'Irvington Group' Artists at Auction 2025

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Historic Irvington Group Artists at Auction –  Autumn, 2025 

Several fine art auctions in central Indiana held in the summer and fall of this year were to feature a number of beautiful works by artists of local interest, now known as the Irvington Group. A series of annual exhibitions by artists living in or near historic Irvington were held from 1928 to 1937, sponsored by the neighborhood's Union of Clubs. A total of seventeen different artists from that era were to participate in the shows over the years.

Frederick Polley, a painter, etcher, lithographer and art instructor, and longtime Indianapolis Star contributor, lived on South Emerson Avenue in those days. He was recently represented by his oil painting, Farm Workers, in the Jacksons Auction & Real Estate Company sale in June of Outstanding Indiana, American & European Art.

Farm Workers depicts the laborers, two each, both man and beast, standing together atop a pink clay mound of bare earth at the forefront of the picture. A single tree in the green of high summer provides scant shade for the men and their plow horses. The locale could be Brown County with its gently rolling slopes of yellow grain and distant blue forested hills. The figures and animals are painted with thin dark outlines which serve to emphasize their placement in a painting otherwise dreamy and sketchy and colored in soft hazy hues.

A small watercolor  by Clifton Wheeler called Smokey Mountains  Landscape was offered at the same sale. The artist lived on Lowell Avenue with wife Hilah Drake Wheeler, also an artist. 

The watercolor is typical of Wheeler's main oeuvre of hilly and forested views of the eastern United States.  His landscapes usually pack the entirety of the realistic detail before his eyes into the picture. As a painter of summer, he mastered all shades of green and all shapes of trees.  A white homestead seems tiny, dwarfed by towering trees that roll slightly with the land before the green peak of a mountain, central to the composition.

A lovely contrast in color, technique and subject is seen in the small watercolor by Constance Forsyth painted in 1928, Industrial Scene. Forsyth, daughter of William Forsyth, lived at the family home on South Emerson Avenue (at Washington Street).

The colors in Industrial Scene are mainly two – a green for the tree and some grass, and a brick red for the linear mesh of the complex industrial building and its works. The organic features are brushed in soft, curving strokes whereas the complex, woven hodgepodge of the building is jabbed and jotted in a series of tightly intersecting marks. 

An auction, also by Jacksons, Fall 2025 Sale of Historic Indiana Art, was held on November 1, and included works of the Irvington Group. Again, in this sale, are works by Clifton Wheeler, but also paintings by William Forsyth and by Robert Selby, who married Forsyth's youngest daughter, Evelyn.

Selby's Floral Still Life, 1939, is an oil painting distinctive for the pure black of the background behind a tall silver tea pot holding a multi color of gladiolas and yellow daisies. Three green apples, one seriously overripe, complete the composition atop a brown wooden table. The mood is somber in the picture, almost funereal, due to the bleak darkness of the background and the strange gaping brown spot on the bad apple almost screaming in the shape of its blemish.

Clifton Wheeler's painting Little River, 1951, depicts a winding roadway view alongside a stream in what must be the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The sunny roadway and its precise post and wire fence snake from front to middle of the painting which is also composed of carefully noted cedars and other bright foliage. Increasingly hazy blue mountains cascade in the distance.  Some rapids in the water and a hillside farm are the whitest bits to center the eye.

Forsyth Home (Irvington), painted in oil by William Forsyth, shows a gray autumn day, at that moment when the trees are changing to yellow, but the lower bushes still retain their green. A carpet of leaves fallen and orange cover the ground of what may be a piece of Forsyth's yard. The home is just a a slender bit of the corner of the building in deep perspective – windows, a door, some steps below and what may be a balcony rail above. The artist plays with the few colors before him, yellow, orange and brown, gray-blue and green. The stucco white wall mutely reflecting some of the color back on the overcast day, with a sky like a gray sun in a large circle formed by the curving boughs of the tree.

Another William Forsyth painting, In the Spring, 1917,  may show a small patch of garden or lawn, strewn with the decaying purple brown leaves of the prior season. It being spring, new green shoots emerge and a couple of sprigs of early season flowers, purple crocus and yellow daffodil dominate the canvas in the foreground.

Finally, Jackson's Hoosier Salon Endowment Art Auction occurred November 7. Clifton Wheeler, Frederick Polley and William Forsyth all had works represented in this sale.

William Forsyth as a srudent

A watercolor by William Forsyth, Autumn Landscape, 1896, seems impossibly modern in color given the date of its creation.  The diffuse brightness of its hues appear symbolic and abstract. Perhaps just darker paint that has faded over time. A few trees dominate the vertical painting, back-lit with yellow leaves, casting pink milky shadows toward the viewer.

A relatively rare, almost treeless, landscape by Clifton Wheeler is aptly titled A Lone Tree. The  sunny stone mountainside of the fir tree would suggest a location in the west. But the hills behind are rolling and green so it may be somewhere rocky in the east. The high drama of the trees footing amid the shadowed crags of a steep cliff-side dominate the right side of the picture, with clouds and sky and distant mountains on the left. 

 A small but elegant etching by Frederick Polley, Landscape with Trees, may show a winter scene of a few trees atop a grassy slope, as some trees appear evergreen cedars, whereas others shadow them with skeletal and lace-like bareness. His fine touch of minimal impression registers as a few delicate, thin lines sketch in the hilly countryside beyond the trees.

A companion painting by Polley, Indiana Hillside Landscape, contains a dream-like effect as its color could almost be moonlight upon the hills.  Some trees are burnt orange as if autumn, and one is spring green, although the treeline in the distance gives the impression of early winter. It is a mysterious little masterpiece in mainly shades of brown. 

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

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