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George Inness Jr. died last week in Cragsmoor, N. Y. He was a competent minor painter with a talent for controversial subjects. Born in Paris in 1854, he studied in Rome and Paris, was given a gold medal by the Salon of 1900, sold a bucolic canvas called Shepherd and Sheep to the Metropolitan. He signed his work "Inness Jr." Last year one of his pictures, The Only Hope, an elaborate cartoon of the world's return to Christ, set the New York Chamber of Commerce simmering. Chamberman Irving T. Bush wanted to send the picture on tour as a tract, but some of his fellow members insisted that the title, applied to a pale Christ lifted above a shrapnel-spattered court, would be an insult to the Jews. Newspapermen described the controversy, divines dealt with the subject; critics alone kept silent. There was not much to say about technique, for over all the able and even powerful work of Mr. Inness Jr. is the shadow of the man who signed his pictures "Inness." "My first memory of my father," George Inness Jr. used to say, "is the vision of him painting a washtub. . . ." There was in that statement perhaps more vision than memory, for Artist Inness spent little time adorning laundry utensils. Even the stories about his hard-pressed boyhood—how he cut off a cat's tail to get his first paintbrush—are somewhat fanciful. He was poor. He was never indigent. From the time that he left grammar school he devoted himself furiously to the studies that made him the greatest of U. S. landscape painters. In his studios in Montclair, N. J., in Washington Square, he worked stripped to the waist, with all windows closed, sweat pouring from his body. His eyes blazed under the shock of hair that kept falling over his forehead; he brushed it back with a sweep of fingers, striping his skin with paint. He made up his own technique. If he had to work out problems by arithmetic when artists more carefully groomed used calculus—well and good; he would get his own answer. Not even the school of Fontainebleau could draw from him the tribute of imitation. "If he had been capable of instruction," said the New York Evening Post at the time of his death," he would have been the greatest landscape artist of any period or people." The pictures that he painted with such stormy concentration were usually as tranquil as twilight. Brown cows sunk in August meadows, fly-twitching, drowsily browsing; sheep streaming, grey blurs, cloud-patterned, home over a hill to a fold of peaceful and fleecy sleep; valleys folded in mist, green V's in the breast-hollow of a hill-range, ponds lying like shields at sunset, fishing boats blown out of shimmer to the white shadow of a cliff patched by a marvelous tiny woman, waiting, orchards in May, acres of blossoms pale and adream with the promise of bees and a deathless summer. Often he would paint two or three pictures on the same canvas; starting to correct a defect in a pastoral scene, a new idea would seize him, he would change cows into rocks, grass into whirling waves, and a chip of moon became a mad sun leering like an eyeball in the forehead of a vast, demented skyscape. Nothing made him so angry as praise of pictures he considered poor. Once a financier stopped with ponderous approbation before the worst canvas in his studio. "Marvelous, Mr. Innes. The most perfect thing you have done."