“My early and much of my later life was borne under the distress of a fearful nervous disease which very much impaired my ability to bear the painstaking in my studies which I could have wished. I began, of course, as most boys do, but without any art surroundings whatever. A boy now would be able to commence almost anywhere under better auspices than I could have had then, even in a city. I was in the barefoot stage, and, although my father was a well-to-do farmer, the boys dressed very much in Joseph’s coat style as to color, the different garments being equally variegated, while schooling consisted of the three R’s, and a ruler, with a rattan by way of change.” At fourteen Inness received some instruction in drawing from a man named Barker, and at nineteen he was working as a map-engraver with Sherman and Smith in New York. It is said that he engraved several plates, but Inness himself evidently counted this apprenticeship of little value, for he later said: “When almost twenty I had a month with Regis Gignoux, my health not permitting me to take advantage of study at the Academy in the evening, and this is all the instruction I ever had from any artist.” He was virtually self-taught as a youth, but his later work was developed and somewhat influenced by the study of other painters at home and abroad. At first he studied Cole and Durand, and his pictures were rather panoramic in theme and hard in drawing. He worked much over detail, and at this early time must have been acquired a knowledge of form and a store of visual memories which were to serve him thereafter. The brittle landscapes of Inness’s youth are seldom seen to-day. What became of them no one knows. He sold them for any sum that would temporarily keep the wolf from the door, and, passing into the hands of unappreciative people, they have perhaps perished. I never heard him so much as mention his very early work, though in his letter to Ripley Hitchcock he speaks of some of his studies under Gignoux as being “very elaborate.” In 1850 he was married, and through the assistance of one of his patrons, Mr. Ogden Haggerty, he went to Italy and spent fifteen months there, returning through Paris, seeing the Salon, and the work of Rousseau for the first time. “Rousseau was just beginning to make a noise. A great many people were grouped about a little picture of his which seemed to me metallic. Our traditions were English; and French art, particularly in landscape, had made but little impression upon us.” Just when he made this statement is not apparent, but certainly it was not his final estimate of Rousseau and French landscape. He was later on much influenced by Corot, Rousseau, and Daubigny; but with his first long stay in Europe, chiefly near Rome, it was to be expected that the romance and glamour of the place with such classical painters as Salvator, Claude, and Poussin would sway him.