Nantucket Historical Association

Back of Nichols’ Barn, ’Sconset By George Inness 🐑

Among the foremost American landscape painters of the nineteenth century, George Inness visited Nantucket first in 1879 and returned on several occasions, passing the summer of 1883 in the village of ’Sconset. In the 1870s and 1880s, Inness’s style had emerged from a more traditional practice, often associated with the Hudson River School, to his increasingly visionary and mystical experiments with art as a means to access the divine “efflux” emanating from the natural world and to “awaken emotion.”

While the “visionary mode” of Inness’s later style coincided with the period of his Nantucket paintings, Back of Nichols’ Barn, ’Sconset, does not fully embrace the mystical “colorism” of this mode. Rather it presents a charming rural scene of sheep wandering through a broken fence in a ramshackle farmyard in ’Sconset, past a group of whale-oil casks that have been converted for use as water barrels. The grouping of casks, barely held together by their loose iron hoops, are relics of Nantucket’s bygone whaling days that littered the island and were especially pervasive for water storage in ’Sconset. Inness creates a vintage ’Sconset scene that features the nosy curiosity of a group of sheep passing through gaps in a neglected farm fence, surrounded by high-grown grasses and wild flowers.

Gift of the Friends of the Nantucket Historical Association with additional support from the Max and Heidi Berry Acquisition Fund and the NHA Acquisition Fund. Inness, George. 1883. 2011.0006.001.