Oil on canvas, 30 X 50" (76.20 x 127.00 cm.)

Museum purchase, 928-0-101

Since the beginning of Inness's artistic maturity, the appearance, inspiration, and expressive effect of his paintings was most frequently described as poetic. And as, over time, the style of his paintings became increasingly more suggestive, as their form became broader and their resemblance's to natural appearance less and less direct, their poetic content seemed to grow in direct proportion, reaching its highest and purest state in paintings of the last few years of his life. Painted the year before Inness's death, Hazy Morning, Montclair, New Jersey is one of those late poetic paintings.
The allusiveness of its style, with all solid form blurred, corroded, and reduced to a pervasive vaporous substance more metaphysical than physical in nature-"a subtle essence which exists in all things of the material world" that constitutes "an atmosphere about the bald detail of facts,"-could be regarded as a logical development and climax of Inness's lifelong belief in the value of spiritual meaning, emotional expression, and suggestion: "You must suggest to me reality-you can never show me reality." Inness, however, disclaimed poetic vagueness unequivocally: "Poetry is the vision of reality ... [not some] gaseous representation.... What is often called poetry is a mere jingle of rhyme-intellectual dish-water. The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths of fact or of Nature which can be included in a harmony or real representation." To Inness the poetic representation of reality consisted in the same facts of nature as reality itself: color, distance, air, space, and contrasts of light and dark.
Inness's creative impulsiveness was well known. There are many descriptions of his frenzied "attack" on a canvas, and of the wholesale changes he could make in a painting's subject or effect in a seizure of inspiration. Nevertheless, by the last decade of his life
Inness painted according to a fairly fixed artistic method, working "in mass from generals to particulars" and finishing with "glazing, delicate painting, and scumbling." In the last years of Inness's life this method did not change, but his productive energy did. As he wrote late in 1892, "I am inclined to think that my days of impetuous painting are ended and that I shall be obliged to consider longer and do less." He admitted that his paintings were often less highly finished. "Until lately," he wrote, "when I became disgusted with slow progress I could take a clean canvas and under the impulse paint a satisfactory picture." But now, unable to do that, he had "accumulated a number of unfinished work [SiC]."
In December 1894, five months after Inness's death, two hundred and forty works in his estate were exhibited in New York, preceding their sale at auction two months later. They were picked, "from a total of some six hundred completed and unfinished canvases and drawings which were found in the studio and residence of the late artist." Only about twenty had been shown before, most painted during the last fifteen years of his life. "They were finished and unfinished and framed and frameless, sketches, studies and memoranda of moods and impressions.... Inness himself would probably be surprised at the resurrection of canvases that he had thrown aside and forgotten."" Announcing the result of the sale in February 1895, the New York Sun said that the $108,670 the paintings brought was "really a remarkable achievement, for these were works left in the painter's studio at his death, only a few of which had ever been regarded as finished and ready to be offered for sale." Hazy Morning, Montclair, New Jersey was number 187 in this sale.

NICOLAI CIKOVSKY, JR.