Autumn Meadows

By the start of the Civil War, Inness's paintings began to show distinctive influences of the Barbizon school of French landscape and genre painting, so different from the Hudson River School, with its scrupulous draftsmanship and its respect for topographical truth. However, the diffuse solar light and misty translucency of this picture does not reflect the dense pigmentation of Barbizon works and suggests the artist's appreciation of the English master J. M. W. Turner, whose qualities were early detected in Inness's work by his critics though they were disparaged by Inness himself.