Montclair, New Jersey

George Inness's 'Montclair, New Jersey' (1889) is a late work by the most spiritually attuned of American landscape painters — his Montclair subjects from the 1880s and 1890s depicting the New Jersey landscape near his home with an increasing atmospheric dissolution that reflected his deepening engagement with Swedenborgian mysticism. Inness lived in Montclair from 1885 until his death in 1894, and the landscape around this quiet New Jersey suburb became the primary subject world of his final decade, depicted in varying atmospheric conditions and times of day.

Inness renders the Montclair landscape with the atmospheric dissolution of his late style — forms emerging from and dissolving back into the suffusing light and atmosphere with an almost Turneresque quality. His palette tends toward warm ochres, golden greens, and the hazy luminosity of late afternoon or morning light. His brushwork in the late Montclair subjects is characteristically loose, the forms suggested rather than defined, the atmospheric quality primary over topographic specificity.