Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County – Part Two

On the Road, 1909, T. C. Steele

To Seize the Beauty of Earth.

That T. C. Steele remained active and productive until the end of his life is indisputable. A February 25, 1926, Indianapolis News article about a then current exhibition in Bloomington at his Indiana University studio verifies his most recent batch of works,

“A special exhibition of winter landscapes painted from the window of his cottage (on campus) this winter by Prof. T. C. Steele...will be on display in the university studio next week. About twenty-five pictures will be shown for first time, including a number of autumn landscapes.

...Professor Steele has completed about fifteen pictures this winter, which season, he says, has been favorable for his work.”

One such work, possibly, is the painting The Bridge Over the Jordan River, 1925, included in the current Brown County Art Gallery show. The work is the latest in date of all the artworks presented in the current show, and the only painting from 1925.

It shows a winter scene with a stream and a few trees in the muted fogs of the season. Its colors are cool, almost moist, a lavender and gray, a soft green, and some warmer browns.  

The Bridge Over the Jordan River, 1925, T. C. Steele

(The exact view of the Jordan River, renamed Campus River in 2020, on the I. U. campus can be seen today in this image taken recently although in the spring or summer. The three trees most in the foreground have grown in size and survive the years.)

T. C. Steele view of Jordan River as it appears today
photo: https://williamscreekmgt.com/project/iu-campus-river-restoration/

In May 1926, just after the death of his fellow artist, and Hoosier Group member, Otto Stark on April 14, in Indianapolis at the age of 67, T. C. Steele was to have a final one-man exhibition. Held at the H. Lieber Company gallery in Indianapolis, the show was reviewed by Lucille Morehouse in The Indianapolis Star and an unnamed writer in The Indianapolis News in the first weeks of May.

from May 15, 1926 Indianapolis Star

The News article appeared first on May 8, and reads, in part,

“Not for some time has there been hung a group of paintings containing such variations of emotions, both gentle and grim, as are evidenced in the nineteen canvases by Theodore C. Steele on exhibition in the H. Lieber Company gallery. Each picture holds before the spectator a mood which expresses itself with definite intent. The artist was not satisfied with the portrayal of a few of these moods. He has swept with his brush a wide horizon and with quiet power has captured in paint a throbbing individuality.

The veteran artist, now in his seventy-ninth year, seemingly has poured into this group of pictures the accumulated knowledge  and skill acquired in a long apprenticeship to the beautiful.”

The writer then describes the span of the creation for the paintings, and their overall effect on the viewer,

“...the majority of the paintings are of recent creation. Twelve were painted in 1925, one in 1926, and of the remaining six, four are undated, one completed in 1923 and the other in 1912. The pictures give the impression that the artists is at peace with himself and the world and that he has launched himself  into a new and vital phase of production.”

The writer describes several of the works included, and also quotes the artist from a recent talk on art appreciation at the Fort Wayne Art School one year before. Steele said, in part,

“I often speak of appreciation both of nature and art, as it is the art of seeing beautifully. There is such an art. It is an attitude of mind. It is not a matter of intellect so much as of sensibility, feeling rather than thought. A work of art is not created in cold blood. There must be the fire of emotion to warm the life of art, and then not a literal representation, but a much greater thing. It is the scene plus the emotion of the artist. Happy is the painter if he can convey to the observer the joy he feels in creation.  To him the beauty of earth is real. He is happy if he can seize and make permanent that which passes so quickly.”

The writer concludes with brief descriptions of some of the paintings, including Autumn Gold, Across Country, From Dewar's Hill and The Big Oak, writing that all the works possess great decorative charm, but something more,

“Unlike most decorative art...they appeal to more than the senses. There is present (in the paintings) poetry of thought as well as beauty of color and simple balance of design.”

from the May 8, 1926, Indianapolis News

In her column the next day in The Indianapolis Star on May 9, Lucille Morehouse contrasts Steele's most recent paintings, which predominate the exhibit, with his earlier Brown County style,

“(The latest works)...have a serenity and calm that impress us with the meaning of a long life  spent in the pursuit of beauty. Running through all there is, too, the same gentle dignity that has always marked Mr. Steele's work. In the color there is a mellow richness of tone that speaks of long years of loving companionship with brush and palette. A feeling of wide, open spaces, where one looks far across the fields and into the sky high overhead, is the result of a skillful handling of atmospheric effects and of perspective...”

Morehouse also comments on several works individually while naming others in the show including Stormy Weather – Salt Creek Valley, Winter Afternoon – Jordan Field, Wild Roses and Larkspur, On Axtell Road and In June.

In the same column, Morehouse writes that T. C. Steele recently visited the Indianapolis exhibit of Richmond-area painter, John Elwood Bundy at the Fine Arts Studio on the top floor of the Pierce Building in the city. 

Her remarks document that Steele, in his old age, in addition to his considerable productive prowess, possessed a continuing curiosity in the overall art world, and a sympathetic and generous nature,

“T. C. Steele paid a visit to the gallery last Tuesday and expressed his admiration for the landscape with patches of snow, entitled Winter Haze also for On the Old Homestead the canvas that won the ...Foulke prize... at Richmond.”  

Lucille Morehouse was also compelled to ask a question in her column. A question that arose as a result of T. C. Steele's always evolving art. She is pondering the changes she has observed in the most two recent exhibits as compared to the past few years,

“The paintings that represented Mr. Steele in the Hoosier Salon earlier in the spring, seemed to emphasize a different phase of his art than the one which we have been familiar for several years; and a large number of the pictures now on display at Lieber's...(share the same characteristics as those in the Hoosier Salon). Whether it means an entirely new period of his art, or is reminiscent of earlier work before he began to paint in Brown County, might be best decided by a retrospective exhibition. And that raises the question, why not have a retrospective exhibition of the art of T. C. Steele?” 

  

True Blue.

Days before T. C. Steele was to die, he was mentioned in what would be his last Indianapolis newspaper coverage of his life.  In the July 18, 1926, Indianapolis Star, in the recurring column From Down in the Hills o' Brown County by Frank M. Hohenberger, T. C. Steele is quoted from the same Fort Wayne Art School address on art appreciation the previous fall mentioned above. 

Morning, 1917, T. C. Steele

As Hohenberger introduced, 'T. C. Steele, dean of Indiana artists, said,'

“Man is by nature a materialist – an artist is one who can see through this materialism and discover the spirit of things.”

Hohenberger continued his summary of the talk, which included a startling, and turns out, accurate  prediction by Steele,

“Mr. Steele predicted that the United States would soon become the art center of the world, saying this country already excelled in contemporary architecture.” 

And the final words in the column, and about T. C. Steele while he was still living,

“He expressed approval of the movement to teach art in the school, saying he believed every child has an inherent sense of beauty which may be drawn out under proper tutelage.”

Less than a week later, the same paper, on page one above the fold, would be carrying the sad news of the death of T. C. Steele at age 79,

“In his home among the hills of Brown County, the House of the Singing Winds, Theodore Clement Steele, honorary professor of painting at Indiana University and one of the leading Hoosier artists, died at 8:30 o'clock (last night).” 

July 25, 1926 Indianapolis Star

The obituary and tribute continued over two pages of the paper and included a detailed biography and the reactions of fellow artists.

Just a day later, news of his burial service and internment at his Brown County Singing Winds property were reported. Lucille Morehouse provides a long eulogy in her column in The Star on July 26. 

About his life's work in painting. She writes,

“He was faithful always to nature, to our native hills and valleys, with their woodlands and meadows and winding streams. He would never twist out of shape a bit of landscape for the sake of decorative pattern. In fact he seldom cared to make his landscapes compositions of the so-called decorative type, other than being true to nature.”

About his skies, Morehouse writes,

“Tragic skies, with great sweeping cloud masses, made little appeal to his brush. In an occasional painting one finds the sky to be almost unbelievably blue, but to those who know Brown County year in and year out, this is true to nature.”

The House of the Singing Winds, Winter Afternoon, 1922, T. C. Steele

 About Steele's distances and the atmosphere in his paintings, and the use of figures, she observes,

“The mists that hang over distant hills were seen by Mr. Steele in predominant violet tones... 

Always there is a fine feeling for light and atmosphere in Steele's pictures. In all seasons and at all hours of day it is a play of light through atmosphere that gives vibrancy and beauty to his landscapes.

Not often did he introduce figures into his landscape compositions. Occasionally there are groups of cattle that stray through the wood pastures...

Mr. Steele was fond of wide, open spaces. One never has the feeling of being shut in among the hills; instead, there is always the feeling of freedom as one looks out or across or up...”

 

detail of The Whitewater, 1904, T. C. Steele

The Greater Thing.

One can see in the current show at Brown County Art Gallery, that 'greater thing' T. C. Steele was speaking about –  the feeling rather than thought, the fire of emotion, the warmness of life and the joy.   

Steele's soul must have quivered when he stumbled upon certain scenes of beauty at particular moments of light and atmosphere, bathed in the striking colors of nature at particular fine moments.  Those certain scenes live and breath yet, on the walls in this exhibit. 

There is a darkness and mystery, a chill, in the early picture The Rocky Stream, 1884. A brooding hope in After the Rain, 1890, with its open, albeit muddy, road and green fields beneath roiling gray storm clouds with just a bit of lightening sky.

Winter Scene (Chicago River), 1900, T. C. Steele

Around the time of the death of his first wife, a somber poetry pervades works such as A Quiet Forest  and Winter Scene (Chicago River), both 1900. 

The Forest shows a foggy morning in winter devoid of  most color, in a meadow clearing in the woods amid a stand of sycamore. The waning green of weeds, the leaching red/brown of beech tree leaves seem wrapped in a blanket of winter gray of both sky and receding hillside. 

A similar fog persists in the nautical Chicago River scene, but with a preponderance of sky and water, it refracts of lilac blue hue overall, an interplay of the misty atmosphere, the emission of smoke from the boat's stack and the play of sky on water's surface. A somber solitude is felt in these paintings.

With the new century, and several changes in scenery, one can sense a new joy in T. C. Steele. His paintings shimmer and vibrate with color and radiate light to dizzying effect. 

Just three such examples of the many in the show from this euphoric period of about ten years are Rancho Cucamonga, 1902, The Oregon Coast, 1903 and Brookville From Across the River, 1905. 

It is almost as if Steele bottled the West Coast and brought it back with him after his journey. But in truth, he had already seen such light, in Indiana, before the trip, as evidenced by such works as Brookville and Brookville Landscape, Sycamores, both 1901. 

 

Brookville Landscape, Sycamores, 1901, T. C. Steele

Perhaps Steele is best known for the Brown County scenes he painted in the last decades of his life. The exhibit has many examples of several sub-genres of work he produced during those years. Autumn and winter scenes, of course, in stunning pictures such as On the Road, 1909 (top of page), Autumn in Brown County, 1914 and The House of the Singing Winds, Winter Afternoon, 1922.  

Floral Still Life, 1921, T. C. Steele

High summer scenes and garden and flower pictures are also plentiful as depicted in Country Road in Summer, 1914, Garden's Bounty, 1915 and Child with Flowers, 1918.  

Of particular interest in the show, and only possible in a major retrospective of such number and quality of works, the viewer can begin to see the working methods of the artist as evidenced in both spontaneous preparatory works and later, larger versions of a same or similar scenes. 

There are at least three pairs of such works included in the Brown County show.

Afternoon at the Ford, 1898, T. C. Steele

On the Whitewater Sands, 1897, and Afternoon at the Ford, 1898, present a nearly identical view of the Whitewater River near Brookville, Indiana. It even seems nearly the same time of year that is painted as the distant hills in both pictures possess nearly the same colors. The earlier piece is the smaller and the sketchier of the two. It has an overall diffuse effect and lacks any particular highlight or splash of light and dark. The larger piece possesses more drama, more color, more reflection on the water and more focus for the eye.  

The Grist Mill and The Old Mill, both 1901, each present the same building on a sunny day, but this time from slightly different angles. The smaller piece again appears the more spontaneous sketch of the scene, with the larger work being more thought out, composed and possessing addition areas for the eye to focus as it moves around the larger canvas.  

And finally, the earliest pair, both named September, both created in 1892. 

September, 1892, T. C. Steele
the smaller work

Again the compositions and dimensions of the scene are almost identically proportioned between the works. Even the cloud formations have many shared features perhaps indicative of a single view of the scene that was later perhaps enlarged, or edited or elaborated upon. 

Whether a true blue rendition of a real scene, or one infused with the essence of some greater thing, the larger work appears born of destiny and would be exhibited at the Chicago World's Fair the next year. 

There is something about this painting that is magical. Reproductions do not do it justice. A combination of bravura handling of the paint, a novelty of soft color combinations amazingly balanced and a pleasing decorative design. Steele achieves a dreamy peaceful harmony born of a direct sketch from nature.

Upon viewing this wonderful show, one sees the unbridled energy of a master at work. The record of his swift brush, from sketch to masterpiece.

A wily, seasoned virtuoso, for whom no holds were barred in his search for the spirit of things.

September, 1892, T. C. Steele
was exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893

Mark Diekhoff, August 2026

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.

Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County – Part One

Over the Hill, 1914, T. C. Steele
in both 1926 and 2026 memorial exhibits 

 

Apex at the Center.

One hundred years ago, in 1926, a memorial exhibit for an original Indiana art legend and founding Hoosier Group painter Theodore Clement (T.C.) Steele occurred in the winter months just past his summer death that year. The John Herron Institute of Art in Indianapolis hosted the event on that somber occasion so long ago.

To mark the centennial of his death, and that original career-spanning show of his work, the largest memorial exhibit of T. C. Steele's work since that time is now at the Brown County Art Gallery in Nashville, Indiana.  

Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County is on view from July 18 through September 21, 2026, sponsored by Bob and Barbara Stevens.

Seventy works in total make up this blockbuster of a show of important works.  

It contains works created, first, as a young student of art in rural, small town Indiana, then through his Munich, Germany studies period. Later, his long portraiture phase and works upon returning to Indiana and living in Indianapolis. 

And finally, the impressionist works, for which he is most known and revered, created in Brookville and southeast Indiana around the turn of the last century and finally in Brown County until his death there in July, 1926.

To recognize with certainty Steele's standing as a foundational and pivotal figure in Indiana's art history, one need only attend the show and examine the numerous works he created over this span of about fifty years. The works really say it all and speak for Steele – his talent, his hard work, his vision and his singularity.  

The exhibition is not to be missed. It is an extraordinary survey of great works, among his best. The show contains an large number of very large, salon-sized works, created for the prestigious art exhibits of his day.

Ambitious pieces glowing with light and color, many with esteemed exhibition histories. A scattering of smaller, dark and turbulent studies of brooding weather or fog. 

Each painting tells a tale or sings a song, with a repeating chorus of an overwhelmingly beautiful, or beautifully overwhelming, natural world.

Too many wonderful things to take in all at once. The exhibition almost demands repeat visits.

Meridian Street, Thawing Weather, 1887, T. C. Steele
exhibited at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1888 and
current Brown County Art Gallery exhibit

Aside the individual story of each picture, taken as a whole, they speak of Steele's eye for transcendent beauty, but also his enlivened soul. 

His paintings are stirring, you feel them. They evoke emotion. They record a virtuosity of the brush in his hand, as trembling as the wind, as scattered as the light and air, as centered and firm as the earth beneath his feet. One can sense the skill of his knowing glance, the speed of his decisions at the easel. 

A close look at his brushwork must be seen to be believed. Random splashes of contrasting color, or stray trickles straight from the tube, are lost in the tumult of a nature released before his eyes and then swiftly reorganized on his canvas for us to see.

Standing before his works, one experience his colors, our colors, our familiar Indiana. And looking at his dashing strokes, you feel his delight and joy and it becomes your joy as well.

No change in the weather or season was too fleeting or minute to elude his keen observation and deft handling of paint. 

Altogether, he paints a symphony as grand as Beethoven. And in this monumental exhibit, a  record of a life's work second to none in the history of our state.

His history as an artist in Indiana perhaps heralded the end of the beginning of the pioneer days and styles of earlier artists, and the beginning of his own art, a blending of European innovations with the light and color unique to our region. 

T. C. Steele would affect the appreciation of art in our state.  He would have a founding influence on not only a region's art, western art as it was called at the time, but also art education in Indianapolis. 

His presence and talent would be the  formative lifeblood of the entire Brown County Art scene. His artworks and his noble example inspired those around him in life, and have sparked generations of artists since his passing.  

To round out our understanding of the man, T. C. Steele, the context of a career so overwhelming in its thorough presentation in the show, we can also look to the last few years of his life, the end of the beginning of the Indiana art we all know today.

Under a Brilliant Sky, 1915, T. C. Steele
in current Brown County Art Gallery exhibit

Proven by His Pictures.

On Memorial Day 1920, Indianapolis Star art writer, Lucille E. Morehouse, described her journey and visit to T. C. Steele's home and studio in Brown County, Indiana. Some of her picturesque remarks about the memorable day are as follows,

“It was blue skies overhead, the fresh green of May-time on the hill and meadow, and joy in the heart of each occupant of the little motor omnibus that sped along the hill road from Bloomington to Belmont...to a range of hills where you go up and up to the highest hill of all, where you follow the road along thickly-wooded  sloping sides and then follow the curve around a level stretch until you suddenly lift  up and astonished eye to an unexpected upward slope, to a flower-crowned summit  and the House of the Singing Winds.

...It was my pleasure to spend a few days at the House of the Singing winds last October. The place was taking on the color of autumn – that color which Mr. Steele has painted into so many pictures. The beauty of it then brought great delight and invigoration. But now – oh, what joy to be there at Iris time! In the time of the blooming of the rose and purple columbines!

...Mrs. Steele has planned and planted with such thoughtful care that the tints and shades afford as lovely harmonies and as pleasing contrasts as do the color tones on the canvas of the artist. It seemed as if all the iris in the land had opened its buds on either side of the driveway from the front entrance – wonderful clear blue blossoms waving like silken banners from their tall stalks; and there were velvety deep purple ones, and rich yellow and maroon, and deep cream, and pale lavender...”

Morehouse is quoted at length to provide an eyewitness account to the beauty to be seen and the joy to be felt at Steele's Brown County house and studio at the time. It is the exact same iris season, just one year earlier, that Steele painted, that same flowered driveway, in a wonderful canvas that is included in the current Brown County Art Gallery show – The Iris Road, 1919. 

The Iris Road, 1919, T. C Steele
Brown County Art Gallery postcard, 2026

The painting was chosen for the postcard and catalog of works that accompany the current Brown County Art Gallery Exhibit. 

As Steele painted, and as Morehouse described, the work shows an uplifting, curving drive through cascades of iris on either side, blooming in those creams and yellows and maroons and purples.  

In the same article, Morehouse describes another nearby scene captured by Steele in his paintings, one such magnificent example appearing in the current Brown County show,

“Adolph Shulz, whose studio is at Nashville, led a short walk through an uncleared part of the estate, the path leading down to the little stream in the ravine which has suggested compositions for several well-known winter landscapes that have been frequently exhibited.”

Morehouse may have been indeed been thinking of the large work, Winter Sunlight, 1912, created in the first year of Steele's full-time residency at his Singing Winds Belmont property. The piece was widely exhibited in its day, at the Cincinnati Art Museum, the annual Society of Western Artists exhibit, the John Herron Art Institute and in Richmond, Indiana.  

Winter Sunlight, 1912, T. C. Steele

This painting was also seen in the original Steele memorial show in Indianapolis at Herron Institute, as an Indianapolis News article on December 4, 1926, attests with its accompanying photograph.

Mystery of the Hill Country.

Lucille Morehouse describes a painting by Steele, perhaps much in the same mysterious style of a prize winning work that included in the current show. It was a painting called From the Hilltop that was exhibited in the 19th Indiana Artists exhibition at the Herron Institute in late winter of 1926. Her March 6, Indianapolis Star article describes the work, 

“From the Hilltop contains the misty poetry of the hill country. A tree-clad and swiftly sloping foreground bears away toward faint and distant ridges. Mr. Steele has sacrificed color for the veiled and gentle beauty of his surroundings”

That same veiled and misty poetry is seen in the large prize-winning canvas, The Hill Country, 1913, which was also on display that late winter of 1926, but in Chicago, at the 2nd Hoosier Salon exhibit. Shown there, as The Hill Country –  Brown County, it won the Best Indiana Landscape by an Indiana Resident and a $200 prize in that show. Its image, title and winning ways are documented in the March 8, 1926 Indianapolis News.    

The Hill Country, 1913, T. C. Steele
widely exhibited from 1914 through 1926

The Hill Country presents a similar muted and ever so slightly stylized and modern approach to landscape that stands apart in the current show. There is a dreamy handling to the background that seems a subtle nod to if not expressionism, then at least symbolism, as practiced by younger local artists of the time such as Dorothy Morlan and Clifton Wheeler. 

Fine detail in the foreground and the haze of suggested space toward the back. Perhaps there was a wildfire or a burning going on the area on that sunny day, but whatever the case, or whatever Steele's reason, the resulting picture is stunning.

A painting by Steele of a similar subject but clearly a separate and distinct work, in the Indiana State Museum collection, was included in the 2024 exhibition Stories of the Salon that celebrated the 100th year of the Hoosier Salon. 

That exhibition showed a painting it claimed to be The Hill Country, a winner at the 2nd Hoosier Salon. However, the painting exhibited in 1926 in Chicago, and shown in The Indianapolis News that year, and now on display at the Brown County Art Gallery, is not the same painting that was in the State Museum show in 2024. 

The Hill Country (?), T. C. Steele
was exhibited in Stories of the Salon, 2024, Indiana State Museum

As Steele had only one painting called The Hill Country in 1926 at the Hoosier Salon, according to the reference book Grand Tradition (aka 'the green book,' by Newton and Weiss, that documents the Hoosier Salon from 1925 – 1990), we must conclude that both the State Museum piece and the current Brown County Art Gallery piece cannot both be the 1926 prize winner.  

Part Two will discuss the discernible periods of Steele's long career and ponder his working methods in examination of the many works included in the current Brown County Art Gallery show, Theodore Clement Steele – Indiana's Master Impressionist from Munich to Brown County.

Mark Diekhoff, July 2026

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.

Lucille Morehouse at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

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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