WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.

IF YOU ARE the sort who turns to art for escape, good luck at the Clark. One of the paintings in a current exhibition was loaned by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. An Eduard Steichen lake scene in hazy grays, it was given to the Fed by a group of donors to honor Paul Volcker, the former board chairman.

Instead of contemplating Steichen, you might wind up contemplating Volcker (wasn’t he the ’80s-era inflation buster?), and how downright murky the financial landscape has become.

Surely the Berkshires are the place to forget about such things. And “Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly,” on view at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute through Oct. 19, is nothing if not soothing. The show highlights techniques that flourished just before the 20th Century, most notably in the hands of Whistler (James McNeill) and Inness (George).

Others included in this gem-like show were either conscious imitators of Whistler or guilty by stylistic association.

Rejecting the obvious virtuosity of naturalistic techniques, the American “soft” painters sought literally to hide their hand. Brush work was obscured in favor of smudged edges and shimmering surfaces. The goal was an art-for-art’s-sake beauty that sometimes veered into silliness but often held up well.

The exhibit opens with a pair of mesmerizing Whistler nocturnes. Painted in the 1870s, both are inky views of the Thames, near which the American-born artist then lived. In one, remote beads of light signal a distant fire and a tower, reassuring the viewer that the shoreline, hence the world, is present. In similar fashion, Whistler conjured a ghostly Venice lagoon.

His smudge-and-veil strategy made its way into full-length portraits as well. One tall canvas depicts a young woman (Effie Deans) swathed in a gray skirt and taupe shawl, her facial features illegible. Form and tonality dominate, making Effie half absent.

Inness, who seemed to prefer the world uninhabited, probably would have hustled her out the door entirely. A hint of smoke rising from a chimney was a favorite motif, and as much human presence as he cared to allow.

Inness’s landscapes appear to have been miraculously executed by powder puff. Regardless of setting or season, they provoke the kind of longing that can send you in search of the real-estate brochure. At the same time, they uncannily manage to be the place where you are already from.

The viewer revels alongside Inness in the joys of solitude and the mystical promptings of nature. (Inness was an ardent Swedenborgian.)

An essay in the exhibition catalogue presents Inness as beset by physical woes that eventually drove him from New Jersey to Florida. Pastoral views of Montclair give way to dusky renderings of a warmer clime. “Eventide, Tarpon Springs, Florida” suspends an archetypal cottage and row of cottony trees in amber light.

If Inness was nervous and retiring, Whistler was a flamboyant self-promoter who made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic.

Grouped among his imitators is the American painter John Henry Twachtman, whose cool blue-greens and grays in the watery “Arques-la-Bataille” and “Springtime” could calm the most jittery investor. (Why did Volcker not rate at least a Twachtman?)

A section of the exhibit devoted to “cultural aspirations” tries to connect “soft” painting with late 19th Century intellectual trends, including the notion that our still young but highly materialistic country could embrace beauty for its own sake.

As proof, the show’s organizers offer Thomas Wilmer Dewing, who apparently specialized in well-bred goddesses romping against anonymous verdure. (My husband suggested he had raided Smith College for his models.) Clad in vaguely Grecian frocks, Dewing’s bare-armed beauties posed with garlands and, in one case, an unusually long sword.

We may give thanks that this moment in art history has passed.

The show concludes with several pieces by the moonlight-obsessed Steichen, who extolled twilight as the time “when things disappear and seem to melt into each other.”

He will get no argument here. Who is not grateful these days for any form of oblivion, especially if it is cheaper than beer? Still, I wish he had not used that word “melt.”

“Like Breath on Glass” is, I fear, upstaged by the very thing its subjects struggled to capture. Nature surrounds the Clark, and has lately been enhanced by some easy walking trails leading to the new Stone Hill Center.

Designed by the award-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the building nestles modestly on a hill, taking full advantage of the views in several directions. It houses the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, relocated from the Clark campus as part of a planned museum expansion. It also contains two gorgeous new galleries, currently displaying masterworks by Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.

There may be worse things than losing your savings. But it is hard to think of much that is better than hiking through the New England woods on one of fall’s sapphire days, and encountering a Sargent at the end of the trail.

M.J. Andersen is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.