George Inness's 1892 oil-on-canvas painting "The Apple Orchard" is an excellent example of a Tonalist landscape, a style that would never dominate American painting but would prove to be an important element of the rising independence of American native style during the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
The painting embodies all those attributes that aficionados of this school of painting like: The Romantic idealization of nature, a palette dimmed by the grays and browns of a world no longer Edenic is its innocence but still very much vital, a world informed by the pagan strengths of the forest and the field. The painting also embodies all of those traits that those who are not fond of this school like to decry: It has a certain muddiness about it in both palette and limning and a certain sadness and sense of defeat, of nature celebrated even as it wanes.
The era of Tonalism in American art was an important one for two distinct reasons. On a purely aesthetic side, Tonalism helped shift American artists firmly into the Modernist camp (Atkins 102). But the era of Tonalist paintings was equally important for American artists because it marked the last era in which artists of this country would be heavily beholden to outsiders for their artistic legitimacy: They would cease after this generation to be in any sense mere copyists of European style.
The Tonalist aesthetic, which lasted barely more than a generation, was poised in time between the artistic sensibilities of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. In terms of its subject matter it looked backward to the 19th century, to Romanticism, to that world of life before the Industrial Revolution that was already becoming a very distant dream. The quiet sentiment of Inness's apple orchard is an archetypical Tonalist landscape: What could be more emblematic of the rural life that was disappearing than these trees in which children had climbed fo...