A Winter Sky (1866): Art, History and Details

A Winter Sky (1866) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is George Inness (American, 1825–1894).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

In A Winter Sky, George Inness concentrated on depicting the effects of light and atmosphere. In this composition, the artist combined a vibrant, glowing sunset with a harsh, bleak landscape. Inness's color choice reinforces this contrast, as the warm pinks and yellows in the sky play off the cool blues of the frozen ground.

Object facts

• Title: A Winter Sky
• Date: 1866
• Creator attribution: George Inness (American, 1825–1894)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 82 x 102 x 11.5 cm (32 5/16 x 40 3/16 x 4 1/2 in.); Unframed: 56 x 77.5 cm (22 1/16 x 30 1/2 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1927.388

A detail from the museum

George Inness originally included a figure standing at the left edge of the pond, which he later painted over so that it is no longer visible.

Collection credit

The Charles W. Harkness Gift

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Bequest of Mrs. Charles W. Harkness." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 4, no. 4 (1917): 63.
• “A Check List. American Paintings and Water Colors of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Centuries in the Cleveland Museum of Art.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 60, no. 1 (January 1973): 21–35.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.