[ Tender tune plays ] Bell: Who are we?

What is the self?

What is the divine?

What's the relationship between the natural world and the spiritual world?

Big questions!

Metaphysical questions.

And they drove him throughout his life.

One of his interviewers said, "What do you do, Mr. Inness, when you get weary of painting?"

And he said, "I turn to theology.

It's the only thing, except art, which interests me."

I think it's very unusual to find an artist who is so deeply invested in those two fields.

Not painting simply to paint, but painting to answer big questions that we all grapple with.

Stavitsky: The George Inness Gallery is really a special place because it is the only gallery in the world devoted to Inness and on this scale.

It was really designed as a chapel for Inness.

Narrator: By the time he died, in 1894, George Inness was one of the most revered landscape painters in America.

He didn't start off that way.

In fact, for most of his life, he barely made a living.

But in his last 15 or so years, George Inness was widely admired for his deeply spiritual gestural paintings.

He could now afford to buy a country place, accessible by train to New York City.

He found it in Montclair.

Stavitsky: The property was very rustic.

It had a lot of charm to it.

He rechristened it as "The Pines."

There were beautiful trees on the property.

He had a cow pasture, wheat fields.

So, it was just this very idyllic place where he painted often.

He went over to Eagle Rock Reservation, would paint there.

I mean, there were many areas that he would paint, so, he had a very strong association with this area.

Narrator: The Montclair Art Museum opened the George Inness Gallery in 2001.

By 2022, it was ready for a makeover, starting with the color of the walls.

Urbay: The color originally, for this room, was a beautiful, rich green.

Very beloved, well-chosen.

So, that was a challenge.

How do you change it and do something well and different?

I would say I looked at approximately 30 or so colors.

Choosing a yellow was to kind of like flip the switch.

So, do the almost the exact opposite of the green -- something that was fully saturated, something that would maybe blend a little bit more with the frames, the gilded frames.

So, in the room setting, essentially, do the same thing that the gilded frames are doing and, overall, we're enhancing the green of the paintings.

In doing this, you really see the subtlety in all the darkness and the greens, and that glowing light of the sunset almost seems to emerge from the wall.

The other thing that was also going to be a challenge, and, certainly, to our curator, was to hang everything salon-style.

Stavitsky: Before we had a more modern concept of having a lot of space, a lot of breathing room between the paintings, and then, as I entered conversations with our registrar, Osanna Urbay, who served as exhibition designer, we talked about the idea of -- and I really have to give her credit -- of what would these paintings look like?

How would you have experienced them when you went to see George Inness' work hanging at the National Academy of Design, for example, in the late 19th century?

And, indeed, one of the paintings in this gallery, Winter Morning, of 1882, hung at the National Academy of Design in one of its annual exhibitions.

And what your experience would be is much closer to what you see here, where paintings are stacked.

So, we wanted to give that sense of fullness, the salon-style hanging that really was prevalent, you know, until the early 20th century.

Narrator: Most of the Montclair Art Museum's extensive collection of George Inness' work can now be seen in the reimagined gallery.

Seen together, they tell the story of his growth as an artist.

Bell: The gallery itself is a perfect synopsis of Inness' work.

He began his career, as did many other artists of his generation, studying the old masters.

You have the Hudson River School-themed work.

Then you have this kind of break in the 1860s, with a painting called -- it used to be called Christmas Eve.

Now, it's called Winter Moonlight.

And you see him breaking out of the Hudson River School confines and painting much more freely and expressively.

Then he goes to Italy for four years, 1870 to '74, so, you see works that he produced in Italy, extraordinary paintings in their own right.

And then the last wall, these beautiful paintings from the late period.

It's a prismatic view of Inness' life and work in one space, and in a space that is designed as a kind of a chapel.

Not a denominational chapel, but as a spiritual space, as a space of contemplation.

Inness was actually trying to find a language to convey what he felt was the actual reality of the world that we live in, the fact that it's constantly changing.

So, that sense of activity and movement and obscurity and uncertainty are actually fundamental to the way nature functions.

To see his paintings is to see an artist who is thinking big thoughts and allowing us, therefore, to think those big thoughts ourselves.

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