Moonrise,

1888

<p> <em>Moonrise</em> is a seminal expression of Inness’s fully developed mature style, an evolution that began with the artist’s move away from his classically descriptive compositions nearly forty years earlier, when he began to create canvases with ambiguous space and blurred outlines. Inness realized a brooding, enigmatic intensity in works, like Moonrise, completed during the final dozen years of his life. The artist’s late style was expressly informed by the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed all things were spiritually charged, and that the earthly, material world was continuous with a heavenly, mystical realm. Inness sought to convey <br> the visual approximation of the “correspondence” Swedenborg posited between the two states. <em>Moonrise</em> epitomizes the hazy, twilight ambience— painstakingly achieved through successive glazing and reworking of the paint surface—Inness employed to achieve this end, in which matter and atmosphere seem melded together in a scene at once palpable and intangible. </p>