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 many years ago.

To mark 100 years since 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, in a blockbuster show of important works.  Created first as a young student of art, 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 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.

Large ambitious salon pieces glowing with light and color, many with esteemed exhibition histories. 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 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. 

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. In this grand 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 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
in Dec. 4, 1926, Indianapolis News

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 last year. 

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 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

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.

The Art Museums of Brown County, Indiana

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

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

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

Brown County Discovered.

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

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

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

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

Now Showing at Brown County Art Gallery.

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

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

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

Stream and Landscape, Will Vawter
Brown County Art Gallery Collection

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

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


Mythologies and Skies of Carl Graf.

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

Self Portrait, Carl Graf
Brown County Art Guild Collection

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

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

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

Spring Planting, Carl Graf
Brown County Art Guild Collection 

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025