Summer in the Catskills

George Inness · 1867

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

50.8 × 77.5 cm (20 × 30 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Romanticism

Summer in the Catskills radiates the quiet, luminous calm that defined George Inness at the height of his powers — a sun-drenched valley where light seems to breathe through the foliage rather than simply fall upon it. Inness painted this in 1867, a period when he was pulling away from the grand, theatrical Hudson River School tradition toward something more intimate and atmospheric. Shaped by his study of the French Barbizon painters, particularly Corot, he favoured mood over spectacle — soft edges, nuanced greens, and a sense of rural life existing in peaceful harmony with the land. The Catskills gave him exactly the unhurried pastoral terrain that suited this vision. Inness was deeply influenced by Swedenborgian philosophy, and contemporaries noted that his landscapes were never merely topographical — he saw painting as a means of expressing spiritual states, not geographic facts. This hand-painted oil reproduction is made to the same dimensions and worked in the same medium as the original, held at the Art Institute of Chicago — allowing the layered warmth and tonal subtlety Inness achieved to be experienced up close, in your own home, rather than glimpsed behind glass.