George Inness painted Looking Over the Hudson at Milton from memory in Montclair, New Jersey, five years after he had stopped spending his summers in Milton, New York. It shows the grand view beyond the back garden at the country home of a good friend of the artist. The steamboat in the middle ground and the ferry on the far bank of the river are reminders that, by the 1880s, Milton, like many other Hudson River towns, increasingly was being used as a vacation spot.
Although Looking Over the Hudson at Milton was not painted directly from nature, its rich color, flickering light and vibrant brushwork recall French Impressionism, which was increasingly available to audiences in the United States in the late 1880s.
