The man and his impulsive nature never changed, though he kept shifting his methods and his point of view from year to year. He went his own pace and was always something of a recluse. The art movements about him interested him in only a slight way. The Academy of Design honored him with membership, but he cared little about it. The Society of American Artists elected him a member also, but he cared even less for the brilliant painting of the young men than for the weak performances of the academicians. He kept very much to himself and painted on in his own absorbed, impulsive fashion. His studio was only a bare barn of a room with a few crazy chairs in it. Wall-hangings, stuffs, screens, brass pots, shields, spears--the artistic plunder which one usually finds in a painter’s apartment--he regarded as so much trumpery. In his later days he came and went to his studio from Montclair, seeing landscapes out of the car-window, and in his mind’s eye seeing them upon his canvases. His art swayed him completely. [Illustration: “Hackensack Meadows,” by George Inness.] He had no pupils, though he corrected, advised, and instructed many young painters after his own method. It was a decidedly arbitrary teaching. Elliott Daingerfield tells a story of one of his own landscapes in which a rail fence was running down into the foreground. When Inness was asked in to criticise the canvas, he objected to the fence and said it should be taken out. “Why can’t I have the fence there if I want it?” Daingerfield protested. To which Inness replied: “You can if you want to be an idiot.” His criticism of older painters and pictures was just as unqualified. And in matters outside of art, where he spoke with no peculiar authority, his vehemence was no less. Crossing on the _Arizona_ in 1887, he talked every one out of the smoking-room on the Single Tax question, so a friend informs me. In 1894, when I happened to be crossing with him, he was as positive as ever about his religious, socialistic, and political convictions. His interest and enthusiasm were in no degree abated. In the mornings he sat on deck wrapped up in rugs under the lee of a life-boat, and amused himself doing examples in vulgar fractions out of an ordinary school arithmetic; but in the afternoon he liked to talk, and I was a willing listener, though I had heard him discourse many times.