On view
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
The Home of the Heron,
1891
At the edge of a forest, along the banks of a stream, a heron stares into the water in search of prey. If Inness had some spot in the northeastern United States in mind when he painted The Home of the Heron, we can be confident that our bird is a great blue heron (Ardea herodias). The coppery foliage tells us it is autumn. Sometime soon, as the nights get colder, that heron will unfold its massive wings, squawk loudly, and lift itself into the sky. It will travel south, perhaps to the Caribbean, where it will assume its alternate identity as a tropical bird until springtime beckons it back to that obscure stream at the edge of that northeastern forest.
David S. Wilcove, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University
More Context
Campus Voices
<p>At the edge of a forest, along the banks of a stream, a heron stares into the water in search of prey. If Inness had some spot in the northeastern United States in mind when he painted <em>The Home of the Heron</em>, we can be confident that our bird is a great blue heron (<em>Ardea herodias</em>). The coppery foliage tells us it is autumn. Sometime soon, as the nights get colder, that heron will unfold its massive wings, squawk loudly, and lift itself into the sky. It will travel south, perhaps to the Caribbean, where it will assume its alternate identity as a tropical bird until springtime beckons it back to that obscure stream at the edge of that northeastern forest. </p><p><strong>David Wilcove</strong>, <em>Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs</em> </p><p>I've had the joy of watching many herons take to flight. It is such a majestic act! They are heavy-breasted, lumbering birds, but they make their hard labor into something very graceful. There's a point in this for me about the elegance that can be manifested even in the large and small journeys that feel lurching and tedious.</p> <p><strong>Alison L. Boden</strong>, <em>Dean of Religious Life and the Chapel</em><br></p>
Handbook Entry
<p>Considered one of the artist’s "dozen masterpieces" by Charles Lang Freer, the legendary collector of American art who once owned it, <em>The Home of the Heron</em> is a seminal expression of George Inness’s fully developed late style, completed at the height of his renown as the country’s leading landscape painter. The artist’s evolution away from the classically descriptive, Claudian compositions of his early career had begun nearly forty years earlier, in Barbizon-influenced canvases of the 1850s whose limited scope, ambiguous space, and blurred outlines anticipate the brooding, enigmatic intensity fully realized in works executed during the last fifteen years of his life. A student of the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed the earthly, material world was continuous with the heavenly and spiritual realm, Inness sought to combine the two in a visual approximation of the "correspondence" Swedenborg posited between them. This version of <em>The Home of the Heron</em>, one of several distinct depictions of the subject by the artist, epitomizes the hazy, twilight ambience — painstakingly achieved through successive glazing and scumbling of the paint surface — that Inness employed to achieve this end, in which matter and atmosphere seem melded together in a scene at once palpable and intangible.</p>
Information
1891
North America, United States, New Jersey, Montclair
- "Two great artists: Inness and Wyant," Fine Arts Journal 27, no. 4. (Oct., 1912): p. 673, p. 673
- Catalogue of the loan exhibition of important works by George Inness, Alexander Wyant, Ralph Blakelock : held at the Chicago Galleries of Moulton & Ricketts, March tenth to March twenty-second, MCMXIII : with an appreciation of the life and works of these masters, (Chicago: Moulton & Ricketts, 1913)., pl. 2
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G. Frank Miller, "Inness' beautiful 'Home of the Heron' will be sold in the Syndacker Collection", American art news 20, no. 19 (1922): p. 7.
, p. 7 (illus.) -
George Inness, 1825-1894: centennial exhibition, January 20-February 9 1925, the Macbeth Gallery, (New York: Macbeth Gallery, 1925).
, cat. no. 5 - George Inness: centennial exhibition, 1825-1925 : Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo, N.Y.: October thirtieth to November thirtieth, (Buffalo, NY: Albright Art Gallery, 1925)., p. 11, cat. no. 29
- A century of American landscape painting, 1800 to 1900, (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1938)., p. 27, cat. no. 34
- A century of American landscape painting, 1800 to 1900: March 8th to 28th, 1938, Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, (Springfield, Mass.: Springfield Museum of Fine Arts, 1938).
- A century of American landscape painting, 1800-1900..., (Pittsburgh: Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, 1939)., p. 28, no. 21
- F. J. Mather, "American paintings at Princeton University," Record of the Museum of Historic Art, Princeton University 2, no. 2 (1943): p. 2-15., pp. 11-12 (illus.)
- Elizabeth, McCausland, George Inness, an American landscape painter, 1825-1894, (New York: American Artists Group, Inc., 1946)., p. 81, cat. no. 41; pl. 40
- LeRoy Ireland, The works of George Inness: an illustrated catalgue raisonné, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1965)., no. 531
- Milton Bloch, Three centuries of art in New Jersey, (Red Bank, NJ: Monmouth Museum, 1969)., no. 22
- Nicola Cikovsky, George Inness, (New York: Praeger, 1971)., p. 129
- Seventeenth century landscapes: Italian, French, Flemish, Dutch: problems of authenticity in nineteenth and twentieth century art, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 1973)., p. 48; no. 34 (illus.)
- George Inness in Florida, 1890-1894, and the South, 1884-1894: April 11 to May 25, 1980, the Cummer Gallery of Art, Jacksonville, DeEtte Holden Cummer Museum Foundation, (Jacksonville, FL: Cummer Gallery of Art, 1980)., cat. no. 13; p. 22-23 (illus.)
- Nicolas Cikovsky Jr. and Michael Quick, George Inness, (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Harper & Row, 1985)., cat.59, 44, 194-5.
- Barbara T. Ross, "Nineteenth-century American landscape paintings: nine recent acquisitions", Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 44, no. 1 (1985): p. 4-13., p. 13, fig. 18
- Allen Rosenbaum and Francis F. Jones, Selections from The Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1986), p. 79 (illus.)
- Linda Merrill, An Ideal Country: Paintings by D. W. Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art, (Washington, D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990), p. 63
- John Wilmerding et al., American Art in the Princeton University Art Museum: volume 1: drawings and watercolors, (Princeton: Princeton University Art Museum; New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 224, cat. no. 57; p. 225 (illus.); p. 339, checklist no. 837
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 265 (illus.)
- Marc Simpson and Wanda Corn, Like breath on glass: Whistler, Inness, and the art of painting softly, (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, 2008)., fig.25, 66.
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 317
