Spring Blossoms, Montclair, New Jersey

George Inness, who began his career painting in the Hudson River School mode, embraced a variety of styles throughout his long career. Exposure to the work of French Barbizon artists as well as to the pantheistic philosophy of Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg led him to develop a more personal approach to painting. Inness’s later landscapes, such as this work, grew increasingly expressive and atmospheric. By the 1880s, a younger generation of European-trained artists—whose work was informed by the French Barbizon and Impressionist painters as well as by the Aestheticism of James McNeill Whistler—celebrated Inness as an American Original.