Almost all of his later pictures will be found to hinge upon color, light, and atmosphere. He was very fond of moisture-laden air, rain effects, clouds, rainbows, mists, vapors, fogs, smokes, hazes--all phases of the atmosphere. In the same way he fancied dawns, dusks, twilights, moonlights, sunbursts, flying shadows, clouded lights--all phases of illumination. And again, he loved sunset colors, cloud colors, sky colors, autumn tints, winter blues, spring grays, summer greens--all phases of color. And these not for themselves alone, but rather for the impression or effect that they produced. If he painted a moonlight, it was with a great spread of silvery radiance, a hushed effect in the trees, a still air, and the mystery of things half seen; when he painted an early spring morning, he gave the vapor rising from the ground, with dampness in the air, voyaging clouds, and a warming blue in the sky; with an Indian summer afternoon there was the drowsy hum of nature lost in dreamland and the indefinable regret of things passing away. His “Rainy Day--Montclair” has the bend and droop of foliage heavy with rain, the sense of saturation in earth and air, the suggestion of the very smell of rain. The “Delaware Water Gap” shows the drive of a storm down the valley, with the sweep of the wind felt in the clouds, the trees, and the water. The “Summer Silence” is well named, for again it gives that feeling of the hushed woods in July, the deep shadows, the dense foliage that seems to sleep and softly breathe. Always the impression--the feeling which he himself felt in the presence of nature and tried to give back in form and color upon canvas. I remember very well standing beside him before his “Niagara” and hearing him say what interested him in that scene. It was not so much the thundering mass of the waters, the volume and power, the sublimity of the cataract, as the impression of clouds of mist and vapor boiling up from the great caldron and being struck into color-splendor by the sunlight. Only an Inness in the presence of Niagara could have thrown emphasis upon so ethereal a phase as its mists and color. They made the impression and he responded to it. Every feature of landscape had its peculiar sentiment to him. He said so many times and with no uncertain voice: “Rivers, streams, the rippling brook, the hillside, the sky, clouds--all things that we see--can convey sentiment if we are in the love of God and the desire of truth. Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of conveying human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can; and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant.” [Illustration: “Sunset at Montclair,” by George Inness.]