George Inness (1825–1894) was an American landscape painter whose long career moved from the dramatic naturalism of the Hudson River School toward an increasingly atmospheric, almost mystical vision of the American countryside that made him one of the most original and philosophically distinctive painters of the nineteenth century. Influenced by the French Barbizon painters, particularly Corot, and later by the Swedenborgian theology he embraced in middle age, he developed a style in which literal description gave way to mood — hazy fields at dusk, afternoon light dissolving through trees, the specific quality of New Jersey and New England air — painted with a freedom and suggestiveness that struck contemporaries as almost shockingly modern. His late paintings in particular, with their dissolved edges and luminous, indefinite atmospheres, feel closer to the twentieth century than to his own time. He remains beloved by collectors who respond to landscape as emotional rather than documentary experience.