Irvine is best known for his landscapes usually of rolling hills, open meadows and old stone walls. He loved nature and found poetry in all that he saw before him. It was not formal gardens and cultivated land that fascinated him but the way light filtered through trees, the way a country wall was composed and the rhythm and sway of hills, knolls and valleys. Irvine is considered one of the masters of American Impressionist landscape painting. He was born in Illinois and as a young man moved to Chicago which is when he developed his interest in art. It was during this early period that he set upon depicting rural landscapes. It wasn't until Irvine married and had travelled to Europe and then returned that he settled in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Irvine was a very experimental painter who was always trying to find new ways to interpret what he saw before him. At one point, he developed a technique which he termed "prismatic". It was based upon the same idea as looking through a glass prism, which effects what light does to the edge of what is being looked at.

Source: http://www.amtfineart.com