The Art Museums of Brown County, Indiana

Brown County Landscape, T. C. Steele, 1922
Brown County Art Gallery Collection

This time of year, as the first substantial changes in the weather in months are felt, one's mind is drawn to arrival of the wonderful change in colors brought upon by the Indiana autumn. And thinking of such colors, one remembers Brown County and the State's most spectacular showing, arriving again just around the corner, in mid-October.

This came to mind for me, yesterday, when I got in the car for the leisurely drive one hour to the south, having an itch to wander Nashville and Brown County, and its area art museums, in the calm days before the coming rush.

Brown County Discovered.

First up, was the Brown County Art Gallery. Founded in 1926 by members of the fledgling art colony that began a quarter century before when Adolf Schultz of Chicago first visited the area in 1900 and discovered the artistic beauty of the region. He would return and ultimately settle in Brown County.

Renowned Hoosier Group painter, T. C. Steele, would explore the region about 1905 and eventually relocate to a property and build a house that became known as the House of the Singing Winds near Belmont, Indiana, southwest of Nashville, 1907. Although his work popularized the region for artists, the semi-seclusion, and expanse of his picturesque hilltop property insulated him from what would later develop into and be called the Brown County Arts Colony. His development in the region, therefore, was almost entirely separate from any goings-on up the road in the ensuing years.

The next arriving resident artists, included Marie Goth and her sister Genevieve (who was a school teacher at the time but would become a still-life painter) and Italian landscape painter Varaldo J. (V. J.) Cariani, who would be Marie Goth's lifetime artistic and romantic partner, although they would never marry, who would all settle in Nashville, Indiana, just north of town, in 1925. Goth and her sister would build a new cabin residence on a property they bought, and Cariani would build his own cabin next door. Genevieve would marry Indiana painter Carl C. Graf who had met Marie Goth and V. J. Cariani at the Art Students League in New York City in days before World War I, and had also become familiar with the Brown County by this time.

By the date of its 1926 inception, the Brown County Art Gallery had fourteen artists members, including all mentioned above, with Carl Graf as its first president.

Now Showing at Brown County Art Gallery.

The current shows at the gallery's 15,000 square foot facility on Main Street in Nashville (expanded last in 2015) is a contemporary photography show, as show of vintage photographs by Frank Hohenberger and Otto Ping, permanent exhibits of work by Gustav Baumann and Glenn Cooper Henshaw, work by Nancy Noel in a room and both historic works from the gallery's permanent collection and current artworks by professional artists of Indiana.

Standouts include the Hohenberger photographs, reproduced in large size that permits viewing from a distance, as recommended by the artist in notes accompany the exhibit. Hohenberger's work can be a bit haunting. Many are images of the region's people, frozen as individual souls, in their own state of mind, their own unique costume, their own pinpoint of stare. It's a crystalline world of black shadows and eyes, dusty gray roads and bright white skies.

The permanent collection room contains several beautiful pictures. One is Stream and Landscape by John William (Will) Vawter, in which the artist, in the controlled chaos of his innervated brushwork, uses but a few colors – yellow, blue, white and gray, and a minimum of green – to transform the overwhelming green scene before his easel, the verdant overdose of Indiana spring or summer, into his artistic scene of a lively, fertile ideal, but made up, primarily, of colors other than green, with that impressionist trick to fool the eyes with a vibration of mixing colors.

Stream and Landscape, Will Vawter
Brown County Art Gallery Collection

In Will Vawter's picture, in a subtle reveal as if to say 'the mirror never lies,' the greenest true green in the painting is saved for the reflection on the stream's waters at the foreground – a reflection of the shadowed greens of the adjacent foliage.

The original Brown County Art Gallery was at a different location in downtown Nashville than that of today, and had a destructive fire to their building in 1954. Squabbles, irreconcilable, among the artist members about how to rebuild, led to a schism that would create a fractured Brown County art community, and lead to the separate Brown County Art Guild with an opening exhibition in 1955.


Mythologies and Skies of Carl Graf.

After the break-up of the original group, it was primarily the two power couples – Marie Goth and V.J. Cariana and Carl Graf and his wife, Genevieve Goth Graf, who started the new Art Guild. Portraits of them all by Marie Goth loom over the entry room of the Guild in its Van Buren Street location in downtown Nashville. It is primarily the work of these four artists that makes up the rotating displays from its permanent collection.

Self Portrait, Carl Graf
Brown County Art Guild Collection

Currently on display are artworks of professional Indiana artists who are members of the Guild, as well as a themed exhibit of works by current Guild members and from the permanent collection called Changing Seasons.

Interspersed among the Changing Seasons are a few canvases by Carl Graf, from small to huge, depicting mythological female figures, alone or in groups, posed like sensuous statues, draped in gauzy white, in the setting of enchanting and unworldly forest glades. A fixation of the artist, as displayed in the works, is of unbridled flight of fancy – an imaginative expanse beyond the visual realm.

This aspiration to a godly other-world, or at least a super-sky, can be gathered in viewing two of the Graf's Seasons pictures depicting spring or summer views of a similar crested hill beneath magnificent cloud-filled skies. The summer view is devoid of people or animals, just the lush green weeds and white prairie flowers of the scene's unfolding meadow – a slight hilled curve bending toward the sky. And filling the sky, which takes up nearly all of the canvas, billowing towers of fair weather clouds that seem roiling even in the stillness of Graf's painted image. A few worn patches of tan Indiana clay are at the picture's foreground, and a beat-down split-rail fence spiders back at a diagonal into the distance to add a subtle frame to the overwhelming sky.

Spring Planting, Carl Graf
Brown County Art Guild Collection 

And in the picture Spring Planting, Graf has painted a similar landscape scene of huge sky and crested field. This time, the Indiana tan soil more exposed as a figure plows toward the viewer, behind two work horses, as two other fieldhands bend or crouch at the soil in other tasks. Again, the sky and clouds are most everything in the rural world of the painting, and hint at a desire for flight – the freedom of clouds – away from a life so tugged down to earth by the relatively minuscule beasts of burden and their hard work, especially in planting season.

There are more Changing Seasons by Graf, more grounded, with fall colors in Glowing Autumn or winter creeks as in Brown Valley in the Snow.

Not to missed in this gallery are a couple of very beautiful, small, outdoor studies by Marie Goth, an artists most known for her portraits. These, like many of the works of the four founding members are small and unframed, and revealed as quick studies on board, as opposed to large finished and framed canvases. The numerous works in the informal state suggest an the abundant wealth of pictures in the permanent collection, accumulated from the donated estates of the artists as they passed away.


A Monument to Creation – T. C. Steele Home and Property.

T. C. Steele Residence, T. C. Steele
postcard image from Indiana State Museum Collection

One must visit the T. C. Steele State Historical Site on a regular basis. Located near Belmont, Indiana, a few miles southwest of Nashville, the facility includes the artist's historic home with its actual furnishings, his large gallery/studio building, a visitor's center, his wife Selma's formal garden, scenic grounds and hiking trails. The donated collection of the artist's paintings that are in the Indiana State Museum collection number in the several hundreds, and are rotated at least annually so that the works on view often contain new examples.

The majority of his work is in the large 'gallery' building. Work from his earliest student days through to the unfinished canvases, he was working, at the time of his death.

An amazing still life with watermelon was the oldest piece showing, and was completed while young Theodore Clement Steele was yet a college-age student. It has the precision and gravitas of a Dutch master painting, accurate entirely in its faithful color and accurate line of drawing. There is nothing juvenile or or amateurish about the picture, rather, even its conception shows a genius of mind, and hints at the singularly greatness of Steele. The watermelon, split in half, contains a core that projects in a conical spur toward the viewer. It's strangely beautiful, in an interesting way. Steele's recognition of the uniquely natural, marvelous and accidental, is somewhat jarring in the picture. The transfixing spectacle of color and form, in something as simple as a watermelon pulled apart, bodes well for his lifetime as an artist to follow.

His visions are captured along the walls of the great room, in chronological order, that follows his pre-impressionist times in Germany, to his Munich days, in which French painting was revealed to him, and his brush strokes became looser as a result. By the time of his return to Indiana, and his days in the area of Brookville and the Whitewater River, he was creating works as free and colorful as Monet, as can be seen in a joyfully-colored sunscape of the Jennings County courthouse from a distant view over fields. The feel of the painting is happy and blue as the sky, fluffy and sun-dazzled as a cloud.

In this period, his impressionism was French, where color ran wild and served only to capture the fleeting moment of the overall sensation – of all the senses of the artist – and feelings of the mind as well, of a creative spirit enraptured in a scene. 

It was later, in a slow and slight evolution, particularly by the the time of the Brown County years, that Steele's impressionism came to realize that the dazzling actual color of the environs of the Singing Winds house were colorful impression enough for any painter to work with. So his loose daubs of pigment remained more loyal to the natural hues of Brown County – its oranges and yellows, reds and browns – the simple blue and green of summer – and less reliant of the trick of color mixing in the eye, as in the first French experiments.

In the midst of his lifework on the walls all around, one wonders how an artist from small town Indiana was able to produce so much and acquire so much by the end of his life. The museum guide could explain the talent of such a person for hard work and never ending practice. The ability to trade the portraits of five governors for the building within which you stand.

The historic site is a monument to creation. Relaxing in a quiet serenity on a front porch of Hoosier perfection, the only sound is leaves rustling. Just fields and sky and singing winds – and between such breezes – a noble hush – a life – Theo's tree has fallen in the storm – a memory of ashes – a soul full of nature surrounds.

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025