Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 3))

THE INFLUENCE OF VISUAL PERCEPTION
ON CONCEPTION AND TECHNIQUE.

Strange, how at times during a conversation a casual remark, to which
no importance is attached at the moment, can grow in one’s mind, many days
or weeks later, to such an importance that one’s train of thought is lead
into an entirely new field of investigation.
On a November morning in 1894 I paid a visit to George Inness, the
landscape-painter, at his Montclair home. We had spent at least two hours
in a lively chat, largely on matters relating to art, when I thought it at last
time for me to go. My host accompanied me to the door-steps. I do not
remember the actual scenery which greeted my eyes, but I have a reminis-
cence of a vast tract of open land, of long strips of dark-brown earth spotted
with snow, and a gray sky full of moving clouds, through which the sun was
shining. It was a most beautiful sight, a veritable “Inness” of his later years.
The painter, bareheaded, his coat flapping in the cold November wind
against his haggard form, pointed at the landscape with a sweeping gesture
and exclaimed: “I wish I could have seen this in my youth as I do now! ”
recalling, I suppose, the labor of years it had cost him to advance his art
from the pedantic, detail-loving style of the Hudson River School to the
mature, constructive beauty of his masterpieces, when he saw everything in
masses. “You probably were not short-sighted at that time,” I remarked half
aloud, more to myself than to him. Still absorbed in the contemplation of
nature, he did not answer, and I departed a few minutes later.
The visit, although memorable to me as being the only one I paid to
George Inness, left as it is so often the case but few reminiscences; my casual
remark, however, obstinately reappeared, and I gradually began to realize
that there exists some relationship between the visual perception of the
artists and the style of the work they are producing.
Of course, deficient eyesight can in most cases easily be corrected by
wearing glasses; but artists are generally more careless with their physical
condition than other human beings, and even should they wear glasses, they
would still, like the rest of humanity, be unconsciously influenced by their
visual disturbances. And that any disorder of the eye will modify in one
way or another the conception one derives from the outside world, nobody
will deny.
In the seventies Inness’s eyesight, which had been normal, began to
fail, and at the same time he adopted a new method of expression. His
execution became broad, free, and liquid. This was surely not a mere
coincidence. True enough, art had changed — the Barbizon school had
done its work. Inness was excited and influenced by its illustrious example,
and most likely would have changed his style, independent of the condition
of his eyesight. But would the change have come as easily to him if he
had not grown hypermetropic, a physiological condition after the age of
fifty-five of previously normal eyes, owing to a diminution of the refractive
power of the lens? In his youth he saw everything “hard,” in sharp

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