(INNESS GEORGE) Album entitled Inness Sale Ortgies Galleries

Sale 1947 - Lot 34

Price Realized: $ 5,750

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 7,000

(INNESS, GEORGE)<>
Album entitled "Inness Sale, Ortgies Galleries, 1895," with 13 original photographs. Printing-out paper prints, 6 3/4x9 inches (17.2x22.8 cm.), each with a handwritten date, in ink, on mount recto. Oblong folio, blue cloth with mounted gilt-lettered morocco title label, soiled, edgewear; several leaves detached, plates bright and clean; hand stamp of Newhouse Galleries on front pastedown. 1895

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Additional Details

George Inness (1825-1894) was an American painter known for his expressive soft-focus landscapes. To Inness, the poetic representation of reality consisted in the same facts of nature as reality itself: color, distance, air, space, and contrasts of light and dark. A highly prolific artist, late in life Inness reevaluated his work and admitted that many of his paintings were often less than highly finished.

In December 1894, five months after his death and two months preceding the auction at the Ortgies Galleries from Feb. 12-14, 1895, a total of 240 works from his estate were exhibited. These items were selected from 600 completed and unfinished canvases and drawings found in his studio and residence. The album serves as the auction catalogue for this sale and contains a host of carefully composed salon-style arrangements of the 240 paintings on the block.

The auction highlighted works Inness had produced during the last 15 years of his life, of which only about 20 had been shown publicly. An article in the "New York Sun" reporting on the results of the auction noted the $108,670 realized was "really a remarkable achievement, for these were works left in the painter's studio at his death; only a few of which had ever been regarded as finished and ready to be offered for sale."<