George Inness, Henry George, the Single Tax, and the Future Poet

Abstract

George Inness (1825–94), well known today for his Hudson River School style and tonalist landscape paintings, was also what one might call a good nineteenth-century American activist. In the last fifteen years of his life, Inness was deeply enmeshed in the crusades of the economist‐journalist‐reformer Henry George (1839–97). George advocated a "single tax," which would abolish all taxes except for a levy based on unearned increases in land values. Single-tax vocabulary resonates in early discussions about Inness's art and in his relations with patrons. While George championed workers' rights to the fruits of their labor and envisioned land as collective property, Inness treated paintings as shared products ultimately belonging to their producers. Armed with this philosophy, Inness asserted his right to reclaim and repaint his sold artworks. Inness's espousal of George's ideas helps explain the foregrounding of laboring figures, as well as a renewed interest in realism, in his paintings of the 1880s. Single-taxers believed that artists would play an integral role in a reformed America, and required that "the poet of the future" emphasize corporate capitalism's unseemly conditions. Emphasizing labor and producerism in his late paintings, Inness may be considered a Georgist future poet.