Interpretive Resource

During the final years of his life, George Inness and his family spent their summers in Tarpon Springs on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Although his health was failing, Inness continued to paint in Florida and produced some of his most subtle, evocative work there. The Home of the Heron was inspired by the marshy landscape and seemingly endless sunsets of the South, and its spare composition captures the artist’s modern sensibilities. Inness’s spiritual beliefs, the guiding force of his work, are also evident in this canvas.

If Catskill Mountains represents the early stages of Inness’s integration of Swedenborgian theological themes into his art through the spare use of symbolic color, The Home of the Heron exhibits his spirituality and artistic style. Inness’s use of atmospheric devices such as haze and mist to blur boundaries between earth and sky, treetops and clouds, unites the various landscape elements. Although he did not use any explicit Swedenborgian symbols in this painting, the seamless blending of the composition does suggest one of the religion’s basic tenets: the unity and harmony of the universe reflects God’s presence. By adopting modes of abstraction to convey spiritual associations, Inness successfully conveyed the otherworldliness of the Florida marsh at sunset.

The Home of the Heron appears to be influenced by Asian sources as well, although Inness, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not collect Japanese prints or ink paintings. Inness balked when critics grouped him with the Impressionists, the group of artists most closely associated with the influence of Asian art, but he may have absorbed Eastern sources through his religious experiences. Swedenborg borrowed from eastern religions, particularly Buddhism and Daoism, when conceiving his theological philosophy and assimilated into his doctrine their ideas about the relationships between man, nature, and deity. The artist’s use of thin, black washes of paint that resemble ink and spacious, spare compositions punctuated by a deeply sensitive feeling toward nature certainly correspond to Asian brush painting. They may also correlate with Swedenborg’s theological teachings.

Inness’s musical sensibilities are also apparent in this work. As Nicolai Cikovsky has suggested: "[I]n paintings like [The Home of the Heron], proportion and measure, size and interval, seem carefully determined and exactly plotted. . . . Although we know that Inness was interested in mathematics and numerology, this was mathematics internalized as an instinctive, almost musical sense of rhythmic relationship, cadenced order, and melodic line." Early modernist painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Georgia O’Keefe would incorporate such musical correspondences and inspiration into their work as well; Inness is not so much their progenitor as their distant and fondly remembered cousin. Early Morning, Tarpon Springs, another late Florida painting, exhibits similar religious and musical qualities. This painting, however, is oriented vertically rather than horizontally, and the landscape clearly is one touched by humans. Inness accommodated and accentuated the tall, gangly trees in his composition and allowed them to dwarf the houses built in their shadows. The lone figure dwindles in comparison to nature, yet, like the trees that surround him, he is not overcome by his marshy surroundings. The overarching tone of the painting is serene and contemplative; the landscape strange and sublime, but not threatening.

Florida was a place Inness visited during the last years of his life, and the experience of aging may have inspired the wistful poetry of his works done there. Sunset and sunrise seem to have preoccupied the artist during these years, and these subjects suit the suffused tone of the paintings. By painting exotic landscapes during his final years, Inness may have been preparing himself for death and its mystery; indeed, aptly, The Home of the Heron was retitled The Sun’s Last Reflection in an 1895 memorial exhibition of Inness’s late work. A less romantic, more pragmatic interpretation is that because the artist was under contract to produce paintings up to the time of his death, he was forced to keep hard at work. Whatever the case, Inness’s body of late work exemplifies both his need to apprehend the spiritual through painting and his continued desire to succeed professionally.