Even when not bothered by many impressions, Inness had great difficulty in contenting himself with his work. It was never quite right. There was a certain fine feeling or sentiment that he had about nature and he wished to express it in his picture; but he found when the sentiment was strong, the picture looked weak in the drawing, had little solidity or substance; and when the solidity was put in with exact lines and precise textures, then the sentiment fared badly. He knew very well where the trouble lay. “Details in the picture must be elaborated only enough fully to reproduce the impression. When more is done the impression is weakened and lost, and we see simply an array of external things which may be very cleverly painted and may look very real, but which do not make an artistic painting. The effort and the difficulty of an artist is to combine the two; namely, to make the thought clear and to preserve the unity of impression. Meissonier always makes his thought clear; he is most painstaking with details, but he sometimes loses in sentiment. Corot, on the contrary, is to some minds lacking in objective force. He tried for years to get more objective force, but he found that what he gained in that respect he lost in sentiment.” This is Inness’s own statement of the case and it enables us to understand why many of his later canvases were vague, indefinite, often vapory. He was seeking to give a sentiment or feeling rather than topographical facts. When the facts looked too weak, he tried to strengthen them here and there by bringing out notes and tones a little sharper with the result of making them look hard or too protruding. After several passings back and forth from strength to weakness, from sentiment to fact, the canvas began to show a kneaded and thumbed appearance. Its freshness was gone and its surface looked tortured and “bready.” He was hardly ever free from this attempt to balance between two stools. It is a plague that bothers all painters, and no doubt many of them would agree with Inness in saying: “If a painter could unite Meissonier’s careful reproduction of details with Corot’s inspirational power, he would be the very god of art.”