Wane of Summer

Greens and golds dominate the palette of this late, informal landscape depicting the edge of a wood where it opens onto a meadow. Crowns of foliage, silhouetted against a late-afternoon sky, and even grasses, are beginning to change color. A bare, lone tree on the crest of a slight rise anticipates the coming leafless winter. Painted just a few years before his death, this work exemplifies Inness' contribution to 19th-century American landscape painting. Unlike the Hudson River artists a generation before him, whose lavish romantic scenes of vast open wilderness came to represent American expansion, Inness focused on the intimacy of natural landscapes. He wanted his work to reflect possibilities for personal spiritual revelation in commune with nature