Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness

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LIFE, ART, AND LETTERS OF GEORGE INNESS by GEORGE INNESS, Jr. ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS AND MANY REPRODUCTIONS OF PAINTINGS. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ELLIOTT DAINGERFIBLD. Originally published in 1917. PREFACE What I would like to give you is George Inness as he was, as he talked, as he lived not what I saw in him or how I interpreted him, but him and having given you all I can remember of what he said and did I want you to form your own opinion. My story shall be a simple rendering of facts as I remember them in other words, I will put the pig ment on the canvas and leave it to you to form the picture. INNESS, JE. INTRODUCTION: Biography is always interesting when true, and valuable in the same degree. It takes on a new char acter when written by oneself in the form of mem oirs, yet is seldom fully successful, because of the hu man temptation to suppress real and interesting facts, or, when sufficient effrontery or courage if it be courage exists to tell everything, the reader is likely to be offended, even if interested. In this way the memoirs of Cellini might have been more valuable, though less interesting, if another had set down the truths of this mans inner life and char acter. It is almost, if not quite, impossible for one to analyze ones own soul and write out for public gaze the secrets hidden there. It shocks the sensitive spirit and creates a wound not to be borne therefore, as it seems to me, all biography treads the broad high way of external facts and passing events, leaving the deep, still pools, which reflect all the spiritual and emotional being, untroubled. In this condition of things we must be content with what we can get, being assured that whatever we can preserve of the life andimpulses of a great man will be of value to the world. It does not follow that intimacy gives one the privi lege of interpretation, but at least it assures us a measure of truth, which increases its richness in the proportion of sympathy brought to the task, because sympathy begets insight. Without sympathy vir tually all observation is blind, and no one quality in mans nature is so potent in removing the scales from true vision. We do not know what we should have had if George Inness had written his own biography. Eccentric it certainly would have been, with slight at tention paid to those externals which are of interest to the general reader for he was the most impersonal of men. He was never interested in himself as a man, though he was interested in the artistic man He believed in himself as an artist very profoundly, and his mind, which was most alert, was ever ddv ing into or solving problems connected with what he called the principles of painting. Of this sort of thing we should have had a great deal, more indeed than any of us could have understood, because he was not always coherent. To himself his reasoning was very clear indeed, he valued the results of these men tal debates greatly, many times writing them down. What has become of these writings I do not know, but no doubt they were written in such a vagrant, jointed way that they could not be pieced together by another...