Henry Inman

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In 1801, Henry Inman, America's premier portrait painter of the 1830s, was born just outside of Utica on the Whitestown Road, and enjoyed a happy childhood here in Oneida County. When Henry Inman was 12, the family moved to New York City, in some measure to advance the young boy's precocious talents in the arts. He served a seven-year apprenticeship with the then-renowned painter John Wesley Jarvis. By 1823 the young Inman was back in Utica painting miniatures of the prominent Utica families that could afford to commission him. Henry's father, William Inman, a native-born Englishman, who had come to American in 1792 as an upstate land agent for the North American Land Company, returned to our area, to West Leyden, in 1825. Henry stayed in New York City as a most famous member of the "Knickerbocker" circle, and together with Samuel F. B. Morse, the painter and later telegraph magnate (who also had Utica family connections), Henry Inman founded the National Academy of Design. Inman was now much sought after by the prominent people of New York City and Philadelphia, and thereafter nationally and internationally, to paint their portraits, till his early sickness and death in 1846. Among his numerous portraits are those of:

Statesmen: DeWit Clinton, Erastus Corning, Nicholas Biddle, Richard Varick, William Seward, Martin Van Buren, and Chief Justice John Marshall;
Clerics: Bishops Charles McIlvaine and William White (in the Munson-Williams-Proctor collection)
Artists, writers and actors: James Audubon, Thomas Sully, William Cullen Bryant, Frances Wright, Fanny Kemble, William Macready, and James Henry Hackett (with Utica roots); and in England, Thomas Babington Macauley and William Wordsworth.

In 1987, the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. published a sumptuous exhibition catalogue of Inman's work, "The Art of Henry Inman," edited by the distinguished scholar William H. Gerdts. But as Gerdts points out in this catalogue and in an earlier article, "Henry Inman: Genre Painter" (The American Art Journal 9, May 1977), Henry Inman has been acclaimed as more than a portrait painter; famed as well for graphic works, for his landscapes, and for his "genre" painting, that is, of scenes of everyday life. And it is in these latter works of landscape and genre that I would submit that the Central New York roots of the Inman imagination can be seen, the effects of that happy childhood he spent in Oneida County.

It is these genre paintings largely of the last decade of Inman's short life that, in the words of William Gerdts, display "the nostalgia for the purity of childhood days, the message of most of Inman's genre paintings": "1842 saw the creation of what instantly became Inman's most admired genre picture and is still the best known today, his 'Mumble the Peg' (Cover & page 6, in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia)...The painting was greeted with much enthusiasm and admired for its presentation of idyllic and innocent childhood."

The "city boy" and the "country boy" playing the child's game amidst the lovely country landscape is surely made up of reminiscences of Inman's own boyhood in Central New York, as is his equally famous last painting (1845), "Dismissal of School on an October Afternoon" . The children are very young, younger than the 12-year-old Henry Inman before he left our locale for New York City. The warmth and joy of the children and the mellow landscape certainly do suggest a nostalgic look backwards to a lovelier time. Inman does place the name of "Ichabod Crane" over the schoolhouse door, in tribute to his friend Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow." But that is a side tribute to Irving's nostalgia; the painting is a tribute to Inman's.

The case is probably the same with Inman's magnificent "Trout Fishing in Sullivan County". Inman was an expert and quite famous angler throughout his life and certainly did some later fishing in Sullivan County. But it would have all started in his boyhood in Utica and Whitestown, likely on the Mohawk River and Oriskany Creek. One other of his most famous (and early) genre paintings is in fact titled "The Young Fisherman", and we have in this painting a boy not yet an adolescent on his way to a stream to fish, picking berries, with a fishing pole over his shoulder. So that Sullivan County may be in the title of the painting, and even in the landscape, but it is Oneida County that is in the romantic sentiment that the painting so beautifully embodies.

Note: This article was written by Eugene Paul Nassar for the November 2007 publication "Mohawk Valley History".