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Start the Emotions. Soon afterwards, the Hudson River school fell from favor. Even its most grandiose productions came to seem thin, brown and finicky. They had prepared the way for equally realistic but less pretentious and literary painters—Homer, George Inness and Thomas W. Eakins. "The true purpose of the painter," said Inness with perfect assurance, "is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which the scene has made upon him. A work of art is not to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion." Inness' Delaware Water Gap (see color) goes on awakening pleasurable emotions in visitors to the Montclair, N.J. Art Museum. Painted in 1859, it is the museum's most popular picture.
The fresh-air fiends among painters nowadays are chiefly amateurs having the same fault that plagued the Hudson River school: a weakness for the picturesque. To their predecessors, the picturesque meant towering cliffs, rushing streams, deep woods, mists and rising storms. Contemporary landscape painters look for a different, milder set of cliches: red barns, spreading elms, old wharves and the like. Professional modernists, for their part, do not set foot out of doors, send their models packing, pull the shades down tight, turn on the light, and paint abstract patterns uninspired by anything.