Lucille Morehouse at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette – Oct. 20 1922 to July 2, 2023

image of Lucille Morehouse at entrance of
Lucille Morehouse Exhibit, Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

Art Ghosts Stir in Irvington.

An exhibition at the Bona Thompson Memorial Center  in June of  2023 called The Irvington Group, 1928 – 1937, along with a detailed and informative article by Steven R. Barnett, then executive director of the Irvington Historical Society, would introduce me to the history of these fascinating founding artists, Irvington's original creative spirits. Accompanying the exhibit artworks was a binder packed with Xerox copies of a multitude of articles by an Indianapolis Star art critic of yesteryear. Only later would I understand the herculean efforts of this trailblazing lady, the depth of her impressions, her dedication over many decades. The output of her coverage, the physical heft of the over-stuffed binder, amazed me. And she, like William Forsyth, had lived in Irvington for many years.

Her writings and the exhibition opened me to a yet another new and undiscovered world, like my own art journey thirty years prior, the art journey of Indiana's artists who came before.  Captured with detail and nuance, through astute observation, and with an often poetic and  signature storytelling approach,  this writer, the first great art critic in Indiana, left a posterity memorialized for us all today. So enamored with her, after seeing her collected columns at the show, I searched the web for more.

Then on the first day of July 2023, I  stumbled upon, coincidentally, a relevant  exhibition, soon ending, in fact in a day, at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette. 

A show called simply Lucille Morehouse. 

Installation View Lucille Morehouse
at Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The World of Lucille Morehouse.

At the exhibitions entrance was a short biography of her life which appeared in The Indianapolis Star, her employer for many decades in the first half of the century, as told by her obituary on February 19, 1961. 

Born in Tippecanoe County, she graduated from Purdue University and became a school teacher. She taught in Kokomo first, an then in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

Other newspaper sources reveal that her love of writing preceded and coincided with her employment as a teacher,  as she was editor for the Purdue student paper, The Exponent, during her college days, and also edited society pages for several newspapers; in Lafayette upon graduation, later in Milwaukee and eventually Indianapolis. 

Shortly after the groundbreaking Armory Show in New York in the spring of 1913 that would introduce the nation to 'modern' art, Lucille Morehouse first appears as an art observer, in print, in the pages of The Indianapolis Star.  Work under her byline would appear in columns of various names over the years in The Star, including, Arts and Artists, In the World of Art and simply Art. 

She established a column with such staying power that the font of its banner began in an elaborate Edwardian Nouveau and eventually settled into a crisp and neat Deco style as the fashion of times and graphic arts evolved.

The poet and critic of modern art at the moment of its genesis in Paris, Guillaume Apollinaire, good friend to Pablo Picasso and associate of many other French artists of the time, wrote many essays on art and artists under the banner The Art World between 1910 and 1913. It reminds us that an art world can be macro and micro, and at the same time. Apollinaire was one among many writers upon whose words our understanding of European art at the turn of the 20th Century is based. Lucille Morehouse was more a singular figure in shaping our understanding of the art world of Indiana. If not for her impulse to see, her compulsion to write, her eagerness to understand, our understanding and awareness of our local art heritage would not be what it is today. And the relation between the French and European trends in art, and the effect on Indiana half a world away, is startling. Indeed, Morehouse's first words on art in The Indianapolis Star (covered elsewhere in this blog) memorialize,  in a humorous way, her reaction to the newfangled thoughts  an out-of-town practitioner of post-impressionism, the East Coast visiting artist, William Emile Schumacher.

From 1913 until shortly before 1950, her comprehensive columns would catalog, in an encyclopedic way,  Indiana's local and visiting artists, its galleries and exhibitions, its institutions and patrons – its gossip even, and goings-on – as nothing, or seemingly very little, as it relates to Indiana art, escaped her unblinking eye.

Already in her middle age by the time of her art writing career, her obituary describes her as demure little lady who was often seen in the galleries and among the artworks she loved.  Dressed always in her recognizable flat hat, and wearing overshoes, carrying an umbrella regardless of weather, hauling a large carpet bag stuffed with her pencils and writing pads. She never fancied the typewriter, so her columns were written longhand on pads, often in newspaper office in the late night and wee hours to meet her deadline.

She lived simply in her Irvington cottage on Beechwood Avenue, an abode that might have lacked furniture and ordinary creature comforts, but was stacked and piled with an accumulation of artworks, many gifted from the artists themselves. A chosen few pictures were anointed the honor of a placement on the wall, most noteworthy, a small nude by Elmer Taflinger. 

She would never exhibit her collection during her life.

In her last decade, Lucille Morehouse became invalid, and lived out her final years in a private nursing home on Central Avenue. 

The lady, Indiana's first great art columnist, although having died, bestowed a living spirit that endures to this day. Bequeathed to all Indiana lovers of art and history and writing. Her gift to us, her life's work, was the subject of the Lafayette exhibition.

Back Where She Started, Tippecanoe County, Indiana.

The Lucille Morehouse exhibit was presented in a medium-sized gallery room of the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette in Lafayette, Indiana. Also on display at the time of my visit was a contemporary regional show of colorful and varied artworks in a large main display area and a solo room of largish decorative paintings by Cindy Wingo in a show called It's Not All Black and White.

At the entrance to Lucille Morehouse was the curator's statement as follows,

“For this exhibition, thirty-two paintings from the Permanent Collection are paired with articles by Lucille. Some essays speak of specific artworks in the collection, while others refer more generally to the artist and their work.  Lucille's words provide a treasure trove of insight into the work and thinking during the times they were created.” 

Through her eyes, amid her thoughts...her words.

French Village at Night, George Ames Aldrich
in Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The exhibit contained French Village at Night by George Ames Aldrich. A March 27, 1932 column by Lucille Morehouse discusses a Lieber Gallery showing of Aldrich paintings,   

“Mr. Aldrich has studied widely, under eminent masters, both in this country and in Europe. He is represented in many museums and galleries as well as in private collections over the country. The present exhibit includes paintings made in France and in Maine, Massachusetts and Indiana. Some of his finest accomplishments are the big canvases that picture winter streams, with snowy tree-lined banks.

He is especially happy in getting realistic effects of sunlit snow – although these are scarcely less beautiful than his representation of shadowed snow. As an example, his beautiful Winter Night – Quimperie, with church dominating in the composition, might be cited.”

In a May 20, 1928 column, Morehouse introduces Kokomo artist, Geraldine Armstrong Scott, with a mischievous story based on the critic's observations of the 3rd Annual Hoosier Salon exhibit, then held at Marshall Field in Chicago,

“Visitors...will recall a portrait by Simon P. Baus, life-size, three-quarters length and in standing pose of a slender, dark-eyed woman in a striking black costume whose distinctive headdress at once caught the eye....Viewers of paintings in the Marshall Field galleries soon marked the presence of a tall young woman who frequently wore a black costume identically like the one in the Baus painting. It was not long until it became generally known that the Geraldine of the portrait was in reality Mrs. Geraldine Armstrong Scott of Kokomo, herself an exhibitor.”

Mrs. Scott is represented in the Morehouse exhibit with the collection's 1928 canvas Autumn Scene.  

Landscape scenes of changing colors have become a common theme for the young artist as noted by Morehouse in discussing Mrs. Scott's works; Glorious Autumn in the Hoosier Salon and Autumn Shadows displayed at both Robertson Galleries in South Bend and finally Pettis Gallery in Indianapolis at the time of the article.  

In her December 27, 1931 article on a solo show by George H. Baker at the Women's Department Club in Indianapolis, Morehouse describes the artist as “one of the most forceful of the landscape painters in the Richmond group of artists.” She further observes his landscape style is characterized by his vigorous brushwork and ability to infuse mood into the realism of his pictures.

A tranquil and bright spring lakeside landscape from the the museum's collection, Untitled by Dale Bessire, hangs with Lucille Morehouse's description of the Brown County Art Colony artist's solo show at H. Lieber in Indianapolis in December 1944. Speaking of a different picture of a similar mood, Spring Comes, Morehouse writes, perhaps quoting the artist,

“Mr. Bessire has put upon canvas a rarely beautiful interpretation of that fleeting period of the early season when the soft green of opening buds has a pearly quality.”

Orrin Draven in Lucille Morehouse exhibit
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

A remarkable painting by Nebraska native and Richmond resident, self-taught painter Orrin Draver, depicts what I can only guess is a landscape with stream capturing an early season snow, as the white-covered ground is surrounded by the dazzling fall colors of bushes and trees still full of leaves that range in color from yellow-green to brick red. The painting also depicts a bright blue, nearly cloudless, winter sky, which glows above and is reflected in the tranquil water of the foreground. The accompanying Morehouse column does not mention this unusual picture, but does note the artist often painted landscape scenes with water as in Still Water and Mirrored Pool, both on display at an H. Lieber show in July 1944. Of Still Water she says, and it would also be true of the collection's picture, 

“The picture is restful to look upon when the mercury soars, and it would be quite as satisfying during the zero days of mid-winter.”  

In her March 8, 1931 column accompanying  the smallish pastel,  Portrait of Richard B. Gruelle (1910), by Glenn Cooper Henshaw, Lucille Morehouse provides historical information about the training and early days of the artist,  

“...Glenn Cooper Henshaw was born in Tipton County, Indiana...he began his art training with a few month's study in the Herron art school when J. Ottis Adams was at the head... he studies for one year in Munich and later in Paris at both the Beaux Arts and the Julian academy. There were portrait commissions in London for one summer and a winter following the study in Paris, and while a student in Munich sketches of foreign scenes were sent home.” 

She also writes about Henshaw's recent portrait-painting “vacation” in Indiana, a homecoming period of sorts, between time at his long-established New York studio and an impending visit to California in anticipation of the establishment of an additional studio on the West Coast. She writes that the artist came back to Indiana,

“... (to) paint portraits of old friends, to study the character of new friends in terms of line and color, and to bring baby faces out from the white paper, their soft cheeks rounding like a delicate pink rose, their eyes full of wonder at the big new world...”

 As a side note, there is a permanent room dedicated to the art of Glenn Cooper Henshaw at the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville, Indiana. The works there include many portraits similar to those described in Morehouse's column, including a full length society portrait and smaller, more casually executed, paintings of children. A very large night scene in oil of a large cityscape also hangs in the room, a magnus opus in the style of the smaller pastel work for which Henshaw is most known today (an most appearing at auction).

It is not certain that Morehouse's remarks regarding a Henshaw pastel Portrait of Richard Gruell mentioned in her column is one in the same as the work in the exhibit. She says about a portrait in her 1931 column,

“ It is also of local interest to know that a pastel portrait that was awarded honorable mention in the exhibition of the New York Water Color Society, and was later reproduced in art publications, represented Richard Gruelle, one of the five Indianapolis artists who constituted the first 'Hoosier group' of artists.

Mr. Henshaw still owns that early portrait of Mr. Gruelle, posed with his palette and brush and canvas, and it is now on view, along with many other examples of work, both early and recent, at the family home of the late Dr. A. W. Brayton...”

The collection's pastel contains Mr. Gruelle's likeness and his palette and brushes, but no canvas. There could be any number of reasons for the discrepancy between the critic's description and the collection's actual picture;  a mistaken description, or memory by the critic if the works are indeed one in the same, or the collection's piece could be a related study, or alternative pose of the pastel referenced by Morehouse. 

The painter Edmund Brucker, perhaps most known today for his portraits and industrial scenes in the social realist style, also painted landscapes that appear inspired by realism and post-impressionism. One such picture, View of Nashville, is mentioned by Lucille Morehouse in her March 2, 1941 column and is exhibited in Lucille Morehouse show of works from the museum's collection.

Morehouse writes of the artistic treatment of surface textures in a November 18, 1951 article,

“Half the battle is won when a painter of still life works skillfully with surface textures. The artist may use all the color on his palette to paint the still life, but if velvet does not have the 'feel' of velvet,  and metal does not have the 'feel' of metal, and wood the 'feel' of wood – and so on – then the still life painting is only partly finished. William F. Kaeser is a skillful painter of surface textures. No Hoosier artist – nor any other, it is my firm belief – can excel him.”

 The collection's Kaeser still life of three contrasting house plants on a hexagonal wooden table illustrate the critic's observations about the artist's surface textures. The waxy, chalky and fuzzy leafs of the distinct plants are expertly rendered in oil paint, as well as the polished sheen of the tabletop.

Kaethe Kollwitz, Folge Tod
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The international artist Kaethe Kollwitz is represented in the show by the unsettling charcoal drawing of a mother and child, accosted by a terrifying figure: Folge Tod.  The title is roughly translated as “Death Follows.” In the adjacent column by Lucille Morehouse, her observations of a November 1946 exhibition of the artist at Herron Art Museum, where she writes about the artist's life and influences. 

Kollwitz lost a son in the First World War, and her attention was turned to themes of poverty, degeneracy and suffering. Morehouse writes about works in the Herron show by the artist of a similar type to the collection's drawing, noting works called  Death Recognized as Friend and Death Seizes the Children,  

“The mother-and-child theme, handled in an entirely different way than the subject is usually pictured in church art, afforded the artist an opportunity for interpretation of deep feeling among (the) destitute and suffering.”

Many other works were included in the show, including canvases by  Brown County Art Colony artists Carl Graf and Will Vawter.  

Additional Irvington Artists, besides William Kaeser, included Frederick Polley, Clifton Wheeler  and Charles G. Yeager are also exhibited. Yeager's modernist landscape watercolor is very similar to, and perhaps from the same series as a work shown in the accompanying Morehouse column from February 4, 1940, called Lakes on Mountain Side. 

Finally, Indianapolis area artists such as Gordon Mess, Elmer Taflinger and  Florence Bartley Smithburn have pictures in the show. Bartley Smithburn's picture, Meal Preparation, is an exotic figurative landscape inspired by her world travels. Taflinger is represented by a stunningly vulnerable portrait of a female nude. The woman seems almost frightened, clutching a thin red cover in her hands at her lap, that drapes to the floor between her legs. 

Nakedness of Thought.

That Lucille Morehouse displayed a Taflinger nude in her home in a place of honor speaks perhaps to her recognition of the nakedness of thought she herself possessed and shared for all those years. The critic's stand, like the artists', in black and white, and all the colors. The courage of a bare statement for all the art world to see.

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025

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Dorothy Morlan in the 1910s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 2

Dorothy Morlan in the 1910s

Active Exhibition and Working Holidays.

Dorothy Morlan's active involvement in the contemporary art scene of Indianapolis and wider Indiana continues with the dawn of the new decade in the 1910s. She continued to exhibit regularly in annual exhibits, such as those of the Indiana Artists at John Herron Institute, the Western Society of Artists, and established yearly shows in Richmond and other Indiana cities. She also continued her working art  holidays at Brookville, Indiana and other locations to seek an ever expanding landscape of study for her painting.

In the waning days of winter 1910, as reported in The Indianapolis News, February 26, the 14th Annual Society of Western Artists exhibit would open at Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. The show included work by Dorothy Morlan and had already traveled through St. Louis and Chicago, receiving good reviews in the newspapers of those cities.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette remarks in the March 20, 1910 edition on a traveling exhibit of Indiana artists just ending at the public library that included Hoosier Group artists and Dorothy Morlan, among others.

The Indianapolis News society page, on April 30, notes that Dorothy Morlan will spending the summer in or near Brookville sketching and painting.

The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram on May 18, 1910, announced in its society column that J. Ottis Adams, at his Brookville home 'The Hermitage,' would be conducting classes in landscape painting over the summer. He was assisted in instruction by Dorothy Morlan, an artist already familiar to many in the Richmond art community.  Ottis explained the allure of the picturesque Brookville area, saying,

“Located on a narrow ridge between the two branches of the Whitewater (River), with quaint old buildings and stone terraces rising from the waters of an old canal, it presents, from many points of view, quite a foreign aspect, furnishing much charming material for the art student; while the streams, rocky ravines, roads and old bridges, in conjunction with splendid groupings of trees, with hills far and near for background, afford unlimited motifs in the immediate neighborhood...from simple door yards and old-fashioned flower gardens to far reaching-views of distant hills or wide stretches of plain such as from the artist's standpoint are unexcelled in the middle west and would be difficult to surpass anywhere.”

A September 23, 1910 front page column in the (Richmond, Indiana) Evening Item newspaper advises that the annual exhibit by the Richmond Art Association will be delayed indefinitely due the fact that the electricity has not yet been installed in the show's location, the new high school building. The lights and other materials having been shipped were en-route,  but their later installation would delay, at best, or at worst, postpone the exhibit to contain works by J. Ottis Adams, Dorothy Morlan and many others.

The show did go on, once the lights were installed, and eventually opened and was reviewed by an anonymous writer in the same Richmond newspaper on October 24.  The writer raves on the newly furnished galleries, perfect for viewing art with gray carpet background walls, natural sky lighting and work that was hanging at a comfortable eye-level. 

The show contained only strong works, the writer opined,  including the “remarkable excellence” of a Dorothy Morlan canvas, The Ohio in June.

An exhibit which was shown in the Marion, Indiana Carnegie Library was covered by their Chronicle paper,  February 3, 1911. J. L. Messena writes that Dorothy Morlan's picture, A Bit of Canal,  “is an interesting bit of work for the freedom and individuality of treatment.” 

As can be gathered by her newspaper write-ups, works by Morlan continued to intrigue and surprise with their skillful and spontaneous execution, effective moody coloration, and simplified compositions and designs – all characteristics distinguishing  her from her seniors and fellows at the time in Indiana. These characteristics, to varying extents, were shared by the so-called burgeoning schools of 'expressionist' artists, among the first 'modernists,' around the world.

The 5th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute was reviewed in a long article in the Art & Artists column on the Sunday Indianapolis Star on April 14, 1912. The column was anonymous, but well written and thorough. The time frame was about a year before the appearance of Lucille E. Morehouse as the by-line critic in the Art & Artists column.

The article contained illustrations of three stand-out works, one each by by J.E. Bundy, William Forsyth and Dorothy Morlan.  Morlan's  was the “...bold, well-executed winter picture, Old Mills – West Philadelphia.” 

Although the newspapers at the time were silent on the matter, perhaps the additional instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, at Philadelphia, that Morlan cites in later years occurred around this time and resulted in the Old Mills painting.

As promised, a year later, Lucille E. Morehouse is on the art beat, and pens her first thoughtful words on Dorothy Morlan in the March 9, 1913, Indianapolis Star.

Her study of Morlan's pictures Approaching Storm and Winter compels the Star's new art writer to contrast the strange repulsive allure of Morlan's somber colored works of dark and chilling subjects. Paintings that could be misperceived and dismissed as glumly uninteresting by average art eyes more keen for the bright colors of flowers or gardens. But Lucille Morehouse had patient eyes and an inquisitive mind,  and she took her own sweet time in front of interesting artworks. Her long study of Morlan's work results in a poetic epiphany in the writer, as she is driven to quote Longfellow in the aftermath of her reflection on the pictures.

Oh, the long and dreary winter,

Oh, the cold and cruel winter – 

As Morehouse writes,  Longfellow's lines “seemed so to harmonize with the spirit of the picture. If you have never felt...with its big icy power, the oncoming winter storm, then Miss Morlan's picture will help you enter altogether into the spirit of it.” 

Morehouse implores the reader again with her suggestion, “But you must take time to see all that is there for you, just as you would take time to read a wonderfully gripping story in the pages of a book – and perhaps to the lay the book down and cry a little...”

Clearly moved, Morehouse writes, “If you take a half hour to study it, to follow that wagon track across a snowy field toward the sheltering home far in the distance, to see the sky grow darker and darker until the whole earth seems to take on a sullen blackness, and then the big white flakes come cutting sharp lines through the gloom – oh, it is all a wonderful representation of nature's somber mood!”  

An anonymous review of the same paintings in The Indianapolis News on March 15, says of Morlan's pictures, “...two large winter landscapes wrapped in deep melancholy, a style which this talented young artist affects just now.”

Modern Art in America, and Indiana.

The Armory Show in New York, officially called the International Exhibition of Modern Art, was just happening on the East Coast of the U.S. 

America was awakening to the shock of not only cubist and futurist visions, but also the first expressions of more natural subjects not enlivened by the play of light and spontaneity like the impressionists, but endowed by emotion and enhanced by obsession. Among them, Morlan and other progressive artists of her generation, the emerging expressionists.   

On June 29, 1913, Lucille Morehouse, in her Star column, detailed the summer goings-on of various Indianapolis art personalities, including Dorothy Morlan. 

Miss Morlan, she writes, “...has opened a studio at her home 6030 Lowell Avenue, Irvington. The studio is built apart from the house and occupies a place under large beeches on the lawn. Miss Morlan will remain in Indianapolis during the summer, making studies for landscape work along the streams and in the fields and woodlands near Irvington.”

The following year, in February 1914, an exhibition and a tea for Dorothy Morlan was hosted by the Art Center Studio, on 142 East Market Street, Indianapolis. Perhaps the Studio was associated with or inspired by the artist Miss Emma King who had hosted a show and tea for Dorothy Morlan on Market Street a prior time. 

An unnamed critical review of this show is carried in a column to the February 3, 1914 Indianapolis News. Morlan's unique meld of impression and expression, spontaneity of execution and deliberative design are noticed and haggled about by the writer, who says, perhaps too critically,

“Miss Morlan's well-known preference for the quieter moods of nature is here illustrated with two large canvases...Nocturne and...Winter Evening... They are feelingly done and colorful, but too thin as to paint....”

And, 

“(in other works) Miss Morlan uses another style, that of palette knife persuasion in painting the sunshine effects...Her color is clean and interesting in harmony, yet we feel too strong a 'family resemblance' in color scheme with all the pictures, as though the artist painted with a  preconceived idea rather than being open to the impressions of the day.”

The critic follows the 'yes, but' observations on a more solely positive note,  

Miss Morlan's dash and vigor of expression engages the attention, and her impetuous handling proves her of artistic metal...”   

The column sums up with biographical information about the artist. It reports that Morlan paints near her studio in Irvington, where “...she finds the simple motives that she loves best.”   It also indicates the artist has painted on the Maine coast, noting the maritime example included in the show. Her Herron and local instruction has been supplemented by then at the Pennsylvania Academy under Daniel Garber, and in New York under Robert Henri.  

Additional coverage of the show, along with a seated profile photo of Morlan at her drawing table appears in the February 8, 1914, Indianapolis Star. New information contained in the column indicates that the show consisted of oils, pastels and crayons. The crayons primarily depicted the vicinity of Hanover, Indiana along the Ohio River.  

It is mentioned that Morlan's earliest creative interest was in writing, but was supplanted by her art ambitions due to the influence of her father Albert Morlan (1850-1926), who was an artist himself, and associated with William Forsyth and others of the Hoosier Group. Indeed an ink drawing by her father is now in the collection of Newfields, titled House at Corner of East Street and North Liberty, 1895.

In the July 5, 1914 edition of the Indianapolis Star, amid a page of news of terrible tragedies and injuries to children as a result of fires and fireworks, it is announced a group of local artists will be decorating the new Burdsal Units of City Hospital in Indianapolis under the supervision of William Forsyth. The women's ward area to be decorated by artists Dorothy Morlan and Lucy Taggart. 

That fall in October, an exhibition of paintings by local artists opened at the (Indianapolis) Propelaeum. Morlan exhibited, as well as William Forsyth, Simon P. Baus, Waymon Adams, T.C. Steele, Emma King, Frederick Polley, Otto Stark and Clifton Wheeler.

On November 14, 1914, Morlan had a painting in the Society of Western Artists exhibit described by an anonymous writer in The Indianapolis News as a  “...picture of Ohio River foothills, with the river far below the level of the eye....charming in its high keyed color scheme, the bare tree in the foreground and patches of snow give a beautiful interpretation of winter.”  

By February 3, 2015, the decorations were complete in the children's ward of City Hospital, as reported on the society page of The Indianapolis Star.  A tea in honor of the contributing artists was given, and it was noted that their efforts were largely offered free of any charge for the benefit of the city, as the limited budget for the project was taken up almost entirely with the purchase of artists materials. 

With war in Europe, local artists would occupy more and more of their time in the following years with  volunteer efforts, and by providing art works for auction to raise money, in service of the armed forces and the like.

The 8th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron was reported in the March 6, 1915 Indianapolis Star. Dorothy Morlan's contribution to the show was “an unusual picture,” Nocturne.  The painting also described in the Indianapolis News the same day as “a composition of houses and an icy stream and a snow-covered landscape in moonlight, beautiful in quality and feeling.”

A year later, in an April 1916 Indianapolis News article reports that the 9th Annual of the same show, again at Herron, contained a Morlan picture , described as “of exceptionally good quality” and “a really distinguished work.”  Winter – Coast of Maine is described more specifically as “beautiful in quaint gray green coloring and structural in composition, with hills and evergreen trees in the foreground and expanse of sea in the distance.” 

On Women Artists – A Man's World and a Woman's Words

In a September 30, 1916 Art in Indiana column to The Indianapolis News, called  'Fifteenth Article. Women Artists.', William Forsyth provides a survey of practicing female artists in Indiana at the time, both professional and semi-pro. Artists include but are not limited to Susan Ketcham, Winifred Adams, Janet Scudder, Caroline Peddle Ball (a sculptor born in Terre Haute, who studied under Saint Gaudens, and was then living in New York) , Olive Rush, Lucy Taggart and Dorothy Morlan.

Forsyth describes Morlan as “a landscape painter of talent” and “one of our best known women painters.”

Forsyth concludes his article with somewhat pithy and Darwinian remarks about art generally, and not specific to women artists, when he states, 

“Art is not an adventure undertaken by the few for the gratification of natural instincts, but a part of the complete expression of a people; not, as is mistakenly supposed, an exotic to be carefully pampered to preserve its life for a select few, but it speaks for its race in a language of its own. It is as sane a natural expression as literature or music. It desires no coddling, but its life is appreciation; without that it must inevitable die...only the strong persist, for they must feel and speak for all.” 

Perhaps I'm reading into it with 20/20 hindsight, but Forsyth comes across as a bit of passive-aggressive, a bit side-eyed,  a bit 'mansplaining,' as it's called today. 

Forsyth beckons backward, perhaps unknowingly, to a classicism of worthy beauty, recognizable by all –  man, woman and gods alike – rather the actual and unfolding individual visions that were then sweeping away all  prior commandments on art. He understands the concept of expression as a vital component of art, its undisputed indispensability – he drops the word twice – but without recognizing the very real and modern 'expressionism' blossoming the world over, including by an Indiana women in his own backyard – namely, Dorothy Morlan, his student and  Irvington neighbor. 

Perhaps an age old wisdom explains Forsyth's nearsightedness in this regard. Quoting the New Testament, Matthew 13:57, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town...”

In the October 28, 1916, Indianapolis News, it was reported that the Herron Art Institute had a Centennial Exhibition in honor of 100 years of Indiana statehood. Relics and antiques were shown as well as a gallery of Indiana artists. Dorothy Morlan's submission was a somber-colored picture called March, which was described as “poetic in feeling.”

On January 20, 1917, The Indianapolis News society page ran a lengthy column, “Many Indianapolis Women Have Gained Fame in State and Station with Brush and Chisel.” Perhaps it was inspired by or written in  response to Forsyth's article of a few months prior, to set the record straight, so to speak, or at least provide a female perspective on the  milieu of local women artists. 

The column is without by-line, and the identity of the editor, whether male or female is not readily known. But the mere fact that the article allows for the women to speak in their own words acts as a counter-point the Forsyth professorial tome.

Morlan's words provide an argument against Forsyth's notions of a generalized, communal and victorious art.

“Art is merely one kind of language for the expression of ideas. When we look at pictures or other works of art, we know something about the artist. If he is a landscape painter we know at once what he likes – the sort of thing that expresses, however imperfectly, his own temperament and outlook, for we are really seeking ourselves in nature, and we are bound to see unconsciously the thing that best expresses our own personal feeling.”

Morlan continues along the same lines, with an example, 

“The more intensely the artist feels, the more likely he is, as he approaches maturity, to seek expression by means of some one definite type. Take Rembrandt for example. Can anyone think of Rembrandt without immediately without recalling the wonderful concentration of light that is peculiar to him, and the atmosphere of mystery that permeates all his work? Why Rembrandt wouldn't be Rembrandt at all if he had followed fads and fashions in painting. Rembrandt expressed himself forcibly in one particular way, just as every great artist must – a powerful way that commands attention.”

About her particular obsessions, singularly revolving around the landscape, Morlan says,

“I am in love with the meeting place of earth and sky. I like best the kind of picture that suggests to me the bigness of the earth – that the sky has no boundary.  I love large and simple spaces. What could be finer than a deep shadow in the foreground, in fact spreading far over the landscape, simplifying everything within close range – then a gleam of sunlight illuminating the distant fields.  This is the sort of thing that makes me wild to paint – the sort of thing that I must attempt if I am to paint at all.”

Uncle Sam (and Lucille Morehouse) Says 'I Want You.'

Within a few months, the United States would join a world at war. 

Over the course of the year Morlan would continue to participate in local exhibitions, but would increasingly volunteer in support of war efforts; helping the U.S. Navy by knitting socks and scarves for sailors, and by donating art for auctions and designing  posters for the Red Cross.

As the holidays approached toward the end of the year, The Indianapolis Star on October 28, 1917, reported that local artists were holding a benefit exhibition with proceeds, in part, to support Indiana artillerymen. Artists contributing to the effort included Otto Stark, Carl Graf, William Forsyth and Dorothy Morlan, among others. 

 The following spring, the 11th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron is previewed in The Indianapolis News on March 9, 1918. New for that year, the exhibit would feature the grouped hanging of works by individual artists to facilitate better comprehension of the artists aims and style, etc.

Dorothy Morlan was only represented by only one large canvas in a side gallery according to a follow-up News review of the exhibit on March 16. The anonymous reviewer describes the picture as “one of her big open spaced landscapes, with a restful color scheme that is satisfying.”  Two days later in a review of the show by Lucille Morehouse of The Indianapolis Star on March 18, 1918, the critic highlights two noteworthy paintings by T.C. Steele, Christ Church, the Deep Snow and The Soldiers' Monument, Mid-Winter Afternoon.  She mentions many other artists and works, but is silent on Morlan, other than by mentioning her participation. 

It can be noted that the columns of Lucille Morehouse in The Star around this time begin with pleas for active patriotism. Such as in the same March 18 column, 'Woman Artists of Indiana are Urged to Aid Liberty Loan,' which begins with somewhat extreme propagandist jingoism as follows, 

“War work comes first. You women artists of Indiana who are busy with landscapes and portraits, with still life and flower studies, put aside your canvases for a brief time. You sculptors lay down your chisels... Your country calls...Your talents are in demand and you are called upon to help win the war.”  

And on on March 31, with a softer touch, but no less government-sponsored tone, Morehouse writes, 

“Here's a new way, and a commendable one, to sell Liberty bonds for Uncle Sam...Will you help? You who are public-spirited and have a few extra dollars in the bank, or dollars coming to you in your next pay envelope.” 

Morehouse goes on to describe that many artists at the 11th Indiana Artists exhibit have agreed to donate all sales proceeds to the Liberty bond effort, and she names then, one by one. Dorothy Morlan's name is not among them. 

It seems a tricky and unseemly business of Lucille Morehouse –  her list of patriots, and as a result the omission of others – which she tries to rectify by writing, “ ...the absence of a name from the above list does not mean that some other exhibiting artist may not be just as patriotic.”  

But such were the war times, when battle lines were drawn not only only on the fields of conflict, but between home-front factions as well.

The April 13, 1918 Indianapolis News reports that Morlan has traveled to New York for two weeks to attend two art shows; an Albert Ryder retrospective for the painter – deceased a year prior, and an exhibit of one hundred works by Rembrandt. 

We all know Rembrandt and Morlan's affinity for him by her direct remarks cited earlier, but it is interesting to study the work of Albert Ryder to ponder the crux of Morlan's appreciation for his work, and discover the threads that are woven between the tapestries of their visions – a subdued, yet dramatic, effect of light, the grand romance of an immense landscape and a personified approach to design and technique.

On April 21, Lucille Morehouse reports in her art column to The Indianapolis Star that local artists raised $500 for the purchase of Liberty bonds for the aid to “ many a returned soldier's comfort.” Dorothy Morlan's name was now among the lengthy 'who's who' of patriots.

Perhaps war efforts were prioritized by Dorothy Morlan, as documentation in the papers of her exhibitions and artworks was noticeably less over the following weeks and months. 

In a January 22, 1919, society page column in The Richmond Item,  'Work of Women Artists Constantly Gains Favor,' reports Dorothy Morlan's absence from a current Indiana Artists show. Esther Griffin White begins her article, 

“ The landscape phases of the current exhibit of Indiana art in the public art galleries are less interesting than the showing of portraits...due, perhaps, to the fact that some of the leading Indiana landscapists are not represented. Among those notable for their absence are...T. C. Steele, J. Ottis Adams...Dorothy Morlan...and others.”

On May 4, 1919, Lucille Morehouse, in a full page illustrated column in The Indianapolis Star reports on a new project utilizing local art talent to decorate several public schools in Indianapolis. Here again, Dorothy Morlan is noteworthy, not in her participation in the current project, but in her absence, only as a footnote, mentioned as one of many participants in the earlier City Hospital project from years prior.

Morlan's active exhibition and travel schedule of the 1910s had slowed by the end of the decade. The lapse would continue over the next few years as will be seen in the next installment of Dorothy Morlan's story in Part Three. 

Mark Diekhoff, July 2025

See Also

Irvington Historical Society

The Hermitage - Brookville, Indiana

Lucille E. Morehouse − The First Word on Indiana Art

AI image by Gemini for illustrative purposes only

About six years ago I was on a walk through my Irvington neighborhood, accompanied by artist and painter, William B. Lawson.  Lawson was acting as a guide to noteworthy houses and sites along the way, several of which had ties to a prior art history unknown to me. Even though I had been a resident of the neighborhood since the early 1990s, I was almost entirely unaware, even ignorant, of the history of the town. 

We were on our way to the Kile Oak, a local landmark among others that had escaped my attention to that point in time.  

The Kile Oak really is magnificent, as I was to discover, and I’d recommend a visit if you haven’t already, particularly if you live within walking distance. 

As we were leaving the shady space beneath the centuries old tree, Lawson directed my attention to a home across the way. Nondescript, a weathered-white cottage on a slight rise from the road.

 

“Lucille Morehouse lived in that house,” Lawson said, pointing.

A 'Newspaper Nose' and Her Call to Adventure.

In one of the earliest art columns penned by Lucille E. Morehouse in the Indianapolis Star, she was on a walk. The date of the column is Sunday, April 13, 1913. 

She invites the readers along for her stroll in a pedestrian-friendly downtown Indianapolis in search of a few groceries to fill the “little, speckled market basket” on her arm. On her quaint shopping list was “a tiny bit of cheese done up in tinfoil, a paper bucket of baked beans−always the baked beans−and always just a nickel’s worth.” Add on a few bananas and oranges and “some homemade doughnuts, at the little stand away back in the Alabama Street part of the Market House.” Finally, she almost forgot, she tells us “...and, oh, dear me, the half pound of butter at 40 cents the pound!”

The most ordinary scene is set. The unremarkable and timeless routine of grocery shopping.

And then, the inexplicable.

We call it the sixth sense today. Or perhaps gut instinct in days gone by. Lucille Morehouse called the primordial tug at her being her ‘newspaper nose.’

And for good reason, by the date of her column that Sunday in April 1913, when she was in her early forties, she had logged decades of experience as a newspaper pro. First as the editor of the Purdue Exponent student newspaper while in college, then as a society editor in the Lafayette Morning Journal during her post-graduate teaching days, and finally, again as the society editor, for the Milwaukee Journal in Wisconsin when she relocated to that city to teach later on. 

Ms. Morehouse describes vividly the 180 degree instant her mundane trek toward doughnuts and butter took an about-face toward what, only time would tell, her art world life on the brink of beginning.

“There was no other choice than to follow the nose. It led me past the Monument and into a little art shop, then back into a tearoom−under the pretense that I was tired out and needed a cup to refresh me.”

Indeed, although her  journey would be uniquely her own, the inciting moment of her road less traveled was at the classic hero’s starting line−that dead end, tired-out point in dire need of refreshment, on the verge of every new adventure. 

A Nationwide 'Armory Show' Kind of Buzz.

Indianapolis was an art town in April 1913. For nearly twenty years the local Hoosier Group painters, including T.C. Steele and William Forsyth, had been making their name as a result of frequent and well-received exhibitions in Indiana  and also large regional cities such as Detroit, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Pittsburgh. They earned their notoriety, perhaps popularity and even their moniker as a result of their many annual exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago in the late 1890s up to that present day.

Just a few weeks earlier in February and March of 1913, art, a new and frightful art, took America by storm when what has become known as the Armory Show opened in New York City.

Controversy and debate raged in the American art world and in the pages of the American press in the seismic wake of the exhibition's opening. After the NYC stint, a large number of the most shocking European artworks from the exhibit had moved on to Chicago, continuing to generate mocking reviews and derisive headlines for the weeks leading up to the day of Ms. Morehouse's walk.

The International Exposition of Modern Art, its official name, shocked visitors, many would argue, with demented visions never imagined outside of the fever dreams in lunatic asylums. Cubism and Futurism were the wild and indecipherable rebels coming for the kings of Realism and the pretty princes of Impressionism. In the same violent and confusing coup, Post Impressionism was taking on Neo Impressionism, Fauvism, Pointillism, Symbolism and whatever the heck, whoever the heck. It was one helluva fight, one helluva sight. 

It is not likely such a notorious and ungainly ruckus would have escaped the curious attention of a seasoned newspaper lady such as Lucille Morehouse.

So when she found herself in the back room of the little art shop, being offered a tea, by a proprietor, who happened to be a friend of a visiting modern art painter from out East in Boston, and when she was offered a chance for a personal meeting with that beguiling out of town specimen... he was a indeed or supposedly a painter of the new art, post art, whatever the hell...how could she say no? 

And she didn't.

Enraptured, She Became an Artist, Herself.

William Emile Schumacher was the post impressionist painter, anticipated by the city's folk for the entire week preceding, and fresh in on the train down at Union Station. In town for his exhibit at the John Herron Art Institute.  

Lucille Morehouse describes their meeting in a most amazing way. She imagines herself as an artist, indeed a painter, and describes herself creating his portrait as a way of introducing him to her readers. This was long before selfies made everybody's appearance blasé. Keep in mind that in 1913, movies were barely invented and photography was still somewhat new.

Morehouse begins her 'portrait' with the artist's hair. “I would first put on the canvas a little fringe of bang, a very thin fringe of bang...”  

Then she moves on to the face.  “...two eyes (I would not make fifty, as some of those futurists might do...)” and “they would be very bright and look with a very direct, searching gaze.”  She would paint a nose, elongated, and  “...of course, I'd draw a mouth, just to keep my picture from being too much criticised.”

Then the rest of Mr. Schumacher she would attenuate and attenuate until he was drawn out “...very long and very thin.”

She paints in a background of colors, cheerful and joyous, bright and beautiful, á la Matisse from the sound of it.

Thus concludes the effusive picture from the imaginary artist's enlivened eyes. Perhaps Ms. Morehouse fanned herself in dainty gloves in faux bedazzlement, in the presence of such a creator. A ruse to inflate the impressive man's ego a bit, and loosen the lips on his under-described mouth? Savvy, she seems, that's for sure. Because she gets a lot out of him. And what follows is not so much an interview, or even a conversation. It is an eruption of artspeak from W. E. Schumacher. A monologue of self-vindication, his artist's statement, you could say.

Evolutionary Brevity, Twainsian Humor and Bullsh*t Detection.

W. E. Schumacher implores and then declares, right out of the gate, “...don't call me a cubist or a futurist...I am an evolution...” 

He explains, in layman's terms, although professorial in tone, the strati-graphic layers of art movements foundational to his state of being. Impressionism to neo impressionism to post impressionism and beyond. Beyond, the place atop and rarefied, that he has attained.

A puckered brow on Ms. Morehead's face seems to draw out further detailed definitions and magisterial explanations from the artist in what seems a losing battle to just be understood. 

In her homespun Hoosier way, she relays her amusement at the tortured machinations of his wordcraft by improvising a few sound bites of her own. She shorthands his three hallowed impressionisms, for brevity's sake, for the benefit of her readers, wink wink. What all art history majors would call the 'isms' in art, she calls the 'imps.'  You get the impression, though, that it's more a troll than an authentic editor's call, her devilish use of 'imp.'  

It might seem a harsh treatment to an artist more adept in the visual realm than the newspaper lady's world of words. But her tone is playful and common sense, Twainsian you could say, where everybody is playing and everybody knows it's a game. It's the art world, after all, where a picture's worth a thousand words. And with the advent of futurism, maybe a million.

Morehouse steers for the middle to end her column. She tones down her brilliance. No more storytelling, improvisation or satire.

She reports that Mr. Schumacher and his art can be seen at various locations around the city, including his temporary residence with a family over at Woodruff Place,  a lecture at the (Indianapolis) Propylaeum, and additional artworks displayed at the Adams-Downing Company on Monument Place.

She also advises that Mr. Schumacher intends to return to New York or was it Boston, somewhere out east, to continue lecturing, and perhaps start an art school some day. Post Imp, of course.

  

If Not a Star, a Spark.

This very early art column by Lucille E. Morehouse demonstrated her virtuosity as a writer. She must not have amused only herself but the paper's readers because The Indianapolis Star would soon dedicate an ornate banner to her byline, Art & Artists, and within a year or so, she was officially 'In the World of Art by Lucille E. Morehouse' in the Sunday edition for decades to follow.

Her many years penning society columns must have served well her preparation by midlife for that inspired moment when she and her newspaper nose ventured into an art shop instead of buying doughnuts.

And what of the acorn of her inspiration that would lead to a thirty years change of plans? Again, the Kile Oak comes to mind. 

Mark Diekhoff,  May 2025

The material used in this article is being used under the fair use provisions of copyright law. The content is being used for educational purposes only, and all rights to the original content are held by their respective copyright owners. We do not claim ownership of any copyrighted material used in this work.

See also

Lucille Morehouse Exhibit 

Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

https://www.artlafayette.org/lucille-morehouse

W. E. Schumacher painting  ca. 1913

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/appraisals/william-schumacher-oil-painting-ca-1913/

Judith Barter: When Modern Art Came to America

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFfShVRmiKg