SUNRISE FOR A 'TWILIGHT'

Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that a masterpiece in the basement goes unnoticed for more than half a century. It is a wonder, however, when a neglected nothing, a dirty ragamuffin of a painting, is suddenly noticed amid a quarter-million stored confreres - is pulled out, looked at, looked at more closely, and finally recognized for what it really is beneath the soot, the grime, the clouded varnish: a treasure.

This is precisely what happened with George Inness' 1851 landscape Twilight on the Campagna, acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945 as part of a bequest from Judge Alex Simpson Jr., then shipped to storage Siberia in the early 1950s.

But in 2005, Michael Quick, former curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, came to town in search of Inness paintings for a complete compilation of the painter's works (known as a catalog raisonné). As it happened, the museum was poking around its own vaults at the same time.

The result is that Twilight was rescued from beyond utter obscurity and is now the resplendent centerpiece of a new exhibition of Inness' work, "George Inness in Italy," on view through May 15.

It's a small show - 10 major works, including several from the museum's own collection of 10 Innesses, plus a bevy of borrowed canvases. Curated by Mark Mitchell, associate curator and manager of the museum's Center for American Art, the show will travel to the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati.

Quite an unexpected turn of events for the painting.

When Mark S. Tucker, the museum's vice chair of conservation, Kathleen A. Foster, senior curator of American art, and the visiting Quick first saw Twilight in the basement, it was jammed into an ill-fitting frame and veiled by a splotchy varnish.

Not promising, but they decided to get the canvas out into the open and take a closer look.

The first surprise was that the frame was so small it obscured broad sections of the canvas on either side. Instead of a tunnellike view of a tree, Inness actually had created a sweeping landscape.

"They took it out of the frame and looked at it together and actually got a sense of its scope, and that was, I think, the moment of epiphany," said Mitchell, who joined the museum staff not long after.

"There was a steadily rising tide of enthusiasm for this picture from that point on," Tucker recalled. "We revisited it and its potential a number of times after that initial realization that the picture has significance that had gone unrealized."

The key, at that point, was cleaning off the darkened varnish, a 20th-century addition to the canvas. Conservator Judy Dion managed the cleaning, and what emerged stunned all involved.

Beneath the varnish, the canvas was covered by a thick layer of what is called bleached shellac, probably applied by Inness himself; while the shellac was discolored in some spots, the surface of the painting was extremely well preserved - somewhat unusual for Inness' work - which allowed his rendering of light to shine.

"One of the great beauties of this painting is its quality of late twilight effect through space and the gradual gradation of color across the sky," said Mitchell. "You have a sense of evocation, of feeling, of mood. The determining, defining quality of Inness' art is that evocation of mood. That's what he said in his own words was his primary objective as a painter. To see it this early, to see it evoked so effectively and articulately, that is really an accomplishment and one that helps us to completely reframe his early career based on the qualities of this painting."

At the time of Twilight, Inness was 26 years old and on his first trip to Italy. This formative period of his career was thought to be completely dominated by his fancy for the great baroque masters, particularly Claude Lorrain, and by the overwhelming American presence of the Hudson River School of painters, such as Thomas Cole.

Indeed, hanging near Twilight are the two paintings that defined early Inness for decades: the Cole-influenced Classical Landscape (1850) and the Lorrain-influenced A Bit of Roman Aqueduct (1851-2).

Twilight, with its asymmetrical composition and delicate depiction of the transient moment before darkness falls, is very different, and shows how early Inness began experimenting with his trademark "tonalism," which Mitchell characterizes as "a very evocative aesthetic of light."

Inness didn't fully develop tonalism, with its use of thin layers of paint that build up atmosphere and environment, until the mid-1880s. But, as Twilight shows, he was already thinking his way toward it in 1851.

This restless experimentation with technique and fascination with Italy, Europe, and the Old Masters serve to make Inness what Mitchell calls "the binder" of 19th-century American art.

"Thomas Cole died in 1848 and Inness tried to get a visa for Italy the first time in 1848 because Thomas Cole, when he went abroad, went to Italy," Mitchell said. "So that's really a moment of great transition in American art. People are painting these great tributes to Cole. It's this moment of real assessment. . . ."

By 1875, after Inness' return from his third trip to Europe and second to Italy, he "is recognized as champion of a new school of painting" and moves America's art from Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School to the brink of the 20th century.

"Especially in terms of landscape, Inness is transitioning from a Hudson River School, nativist aesthetics, really patriotic aesthetics, grounded in the American landscape, trying to understand what it was that was definitively, uniquely American about this landscape," Mitchell said. "He began to reframe it as a style that was very much of this country but that was informed by artists of France, of Italy, and trying to lead the world, not just the country."

Inness, whose reputation has begun to rise again in recent years, was "like some of the more visionary artists, romantics of his period."

The Art Museum hosts a symposium, "George Inness and the Art of Italy," on Friday from 2:30 to 5 p.m. in the Van Pelt Auditorium. Frances Mayes, author of "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "Every Day in Tuscany," delivers a keynote address at 6:30.

Call 215-235-7469 or visit www.philamuseum.org, for information and ticket prices.

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