The arrival of the railroad in Montclair in the 1830s transformed a rural agricultural village into a prosperous suburban community, with a rail link to New York that was too expensive for the working class that traveled by street cars and trolleys. Montclair's arts community centered on landscape painter George Inness, who visited for several seasons beginning in 1878 and made it his home from 1885 until he died in 1894, when the "New York Times" described Montclair as "the home of more prominent artists and wealthy art connoisseurs, probably, than any other place in New-Jersey." Others had preceded him as early as the 1860s, when illustrators Harry Fenn and Charles Parsons commuted by rail to their New York City studios, just as Inness and others did in the decades that followed. They were year-round resident-commuters and varied in their stylistic approaches, unlike the impressionists that abandoned city life to gather for the summer in the "art colonies" at the end of the 19th century in Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut, and New Hope, Pennsylvania. Charles Eaton painted in a style much like that of Inness and Frederick Judd Waugh devoted himself to seascapes, while painter Henry Rankin Poore preferred a "workaday realism " in subject and texture of brushwork and his colleague Frederick Ballard Williams adopted a "more rough-hewn and turbulent form". Walter and Emilie Greenough worked as stained-glass designers in the studio of John LaFarge, who lived in Montclair for a time as well. Sculptors included Jonathan Scott Hartley, Inness's son-in-law, and William Couper.