Monte Lucia, Perugia

Provenance

Estate of the artist

Sale: Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, New York, Executor’s Sale of Paintings by the Late George Inness, N.A., 12-14 February 1895, lot 86

P. H. McMahon, Brooklyn, New York

William H. Cummings, Brooklyn, New York

Sale: Anderson Galleries, New York, William H. Cummings Estate Sale, April 29, 1921, lot 68

Albert R. Jones, Kansas City, Missouri

By descent to the daughter of the above, Virginia Jones Mullin

The Estate of Ralph E. Mullin (husband of the above)

Exhibited

New York, American Fine Arts Society, Exhibition of the Paintings Left by the Late George Inness, December 27, 1894, p. 42, no. 161

Kansas City, Missouri, The Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum, George Inness (1825-1894); An Exhibition of Paintings from the Collection and in Memory of Mr. and Mrs. Albert R. Jones, 1958, no. 6

Literature

Montezuma, “The Inness Paintings,” The Art Amateur 32, no. 3 ( February 1895): 77

Ross E. Taggart, “George Inness,” The Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum Bulletin 1, no. 2 (December 1958): 20, listed as Perugia and the Valley

Leroy Ireland, The Works of George Inness: An Illustrated Catalogue Raisonné, Austin, Texas, 1965, p. 155-156, no. 636, illustrated

Michael Quick, George Inness: A Catalogue Raisonné, vol. I, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 2007, p. 446-447, no. 492, illustrated p. 18

From the 1895 article by Montezuma in The Art Amateur:

To gain an idea of Inness’s life-work, it will be best to take the display at The Fine Arts Building first.  It contains a number of small and carefully but freely painted early pictures, mostly of Italian subjects, none of which should be passed over by the visitor, though we are compelled to speak of but a few . . .Another Italian picture, “Monte Lucia, Perugia, Italy,” is even more picturesquely composed [than “Viaduct at Laricha, Italy”], slightly warmer in color, and more boldly painted.  The foreground here rises to the left, with a number of old olive and cypress-trees, in the shade of which figures are scattered about.  Cloud shadows fall on the immediate foreground and on a dark mass of trees in the middle distance.  The remainder of the picture is in light, running off to a broken distance, dotted with white houses.