NEW BRITAIN, CONN.- The New Britain Museum of American Art presents a special installation of Light Triumphant (1861) by artist George Inness (1825–1894) in the Henry and Sharon Martin Gallery, from June 8—September 5, 2016.

Painted in 1861 and exhibited at the National Academy in 1862, where it received significant reviews, Light Triumphant thereafter was considered either lost or destroyed. Known primarily from a wood engraving reproduced and referred to by Inness scholars through the years, it reappeared on the American art market in 2015. Thus it has now been one hundred and fifty-four years since it was previously exhibited.

Quoted in more modern times is the review praising the painting as: “Now unlocated, Light Triumphant was, when exhibited in 1862, more thoroughly discussed than any of Inness’s paintings had been before then and in no painting had the interpretive and expressive aims of his landscape been as clearly perceived or positively received… It is rendered with a dash and spirit that plainly tells us that it was painted in a sort of fine frenzy of admiration for the subject…surely, surely, this man’s hand must have been nervous and trembling with enthusiasm when he painted this work…”1

George Inness, Jr., an artist himself, wrote of this painting: “You would know it anywhere. Each leaf is painted on the tree; a herd of cattle is passing from a field to take the road that crosses on a bridge that leaves to home, where, after their bursting udders have yielded up their store, they’ll lay them down to rest, content to know they are lending to the joy of life that is pictured everywhere. They are bathed in that triumphant light which years and years ago Henry Ward Beecher named The Light Triumphant and prophesied the future of its painter.”2

Artists often leave to the viewer the pleasure of searching for the meaning within a painting. Inness was a republican and an abolitionist and his painting of 1861—which includes a commingling of vaporous clouds and an azure sky, murmuring steam and quiet meadow, field and forest, hills and mountains, following a storm—gives glorious promise of peace and joy to come at the conclusion of the Civil War. This is much the message communicated in the famous Inness painting Peace and Plenty, which was executed four years later. Light Triumphant is now the property of the David and Laura Grey collection.


1 Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., George Inness (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 41.
2 George Inness, Jr., Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness (New York: The Century Co., 1917), 244-245.