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

Review of 'Stories of the Salon' Companion Exhibit to the 100th Annual Hoosier Art Salon

Booth Tarkington Portrait  by Wayman Adams? from Stories of the Salon

A Thousand Words on Stories of the Salon. 

Running at the same time and in an adjacent room to the 100th Annual Hoosier Art Salon, The Indiana State Museum presents Stories of the Salon from August 24 through October 20, 2024.

From several impressive, French Salon-scale paintings by Hoosier Group artists such as T.C. Steele, Wayman Adams and William Forsyth, who exhibited in the early years of the annual exhibit when it was still held in Chicago, to recent scenes and visions by this century's artists, the companion show presents a visual narrative of the evolution and variety of many of Indiana's great artworks and artists.

Deliberate Men and Their Noble Vocation.

A massive, even monumental, floral still life by William Forsyth encapsulates the dark, severe and Victorian tastes of the art buying public around the first quarter of last century. It's easy to imagine the painting looming aside a dark dining room table amid thick florid drapery, intricate and ornate carpets and wallpapers, clusters of  bric-a-brac, and the dim glimmer of china and crystal. Lost in an enveloping clutter, the painting itself and its subject floral, vestiges of color and reflection, overwhelmed by a dark palette of background suffocation. 

Brighter, and less time-trapped, but of an equally monumental scale is The Hill Country by T.C. Steele from the 2nd Annual Salon, 1926. A close inspection reveals Steele's use of the entire color wheel spectrum from yellow to violet in the sky, red ochre to green in the pleasing roll of Hoosier hills, orange in the fore to blue in the aft of his stately composition. Steele's abundant and joyful hues are both delirious and delicious, attributes befitting his impressionist ways. 

The famous Art Jury by Wayman Adams, is a near life-size, multi-portrait of huddled, standing men and is included as well. It was also shown in the 2nd Hoosier Salon. In the magnificent picture, he presents the history of his subject in a neighborly way like a Normal Rockwell front porch conversation of sideways glances and under the breath gossips. You sense a dynamism of mischief and competition among the men he portrayed, the titans of Indiana art at the time, as they choose the winners from the others in their art show deliberations.

Pioneer Women of the Morris Scene.

Three artists who all once practiced their craft as pioneers within the confines of the spacious Morris Building artists' enclave on South Meridian Street (later called the Faris Building) can be seen within several feet of each other at the exhibit. Sky Rider, by Lois Main Templeton was in the 67th Salon in 1991. The painting is discernible from her later work in the '90s, in that it is smaller, more buoyantly colorful, and is less purely abstract. It does possess her signature touch of gesture and action, and her bold use of line. The yellowish block in the golden triangle area of the work would become a predominant color in years to come.  

The Leaders by Ellie Siskind from the 1986 Salon, presents the namesake subjects as comic book grim reapers. The simplicity of the overall imagery, the candy-wrap colors and the five figures' deathheads are reminiscent of Mexican Day of the Dead sculpture. Perhaps world leaders they are, as the sole female among them sports a blouse that seems like a nod to Margaret Thatcher, one of the others is dressed in a military outfit and cap that recalls Saddam Hussein, and either of a couple of other wrinkly necks could easily be Ronald Reagan under a mask. Somehow this painting survives its own wiffs of propaganda, as we whistle by its graveyard, maybe due to the allure of the lurid hues and the playfulness of its shock.

The final of the three, is a  sculpture Fragile Shards / PTSD by Clare Hollett from the 99th Salon in 2023.  The work's title alludes to mental health and its stark color contrasts of black porcelain base and white ceramic shards present a bipolar unease of their own. The shards are irregular facets repelled from the core, not ordered and unfolding like blossoms, but adverse like magnetic repulsion and entropic like explosion or flame. Or appearing actually, like a box of Kleenex, sneezed at from within.

The Capture of Mid-Century Escapism.

On another section of wall are three works which hang well together. All offer mid-century views of one type or another. Harley W. Rhodehamell III, by Marie Goth, was created and shown in 1964 at the 40th Hoosier Salon. The delightful child's portrait shows a polite young cowboy, sitting up straight, attentive, hands crossed in his lap and dressed for a gunfight if given permission. He wears a getup of suede riding pants and vest, baby blue stetson, and pink button-down shirt peaking from a dark gray longsleeve v-neck like a rakish bandanna around his neck. His trusty cap-gun hangs by the ready, its belt and holster slung over the back of chair at his side. With the passage of time, the artwork operates on dual levels. The painting itself is impeccable, the relaxed handling perfect for the portrait of child.  But looking at its innocence with the jaded focus of modern eyes now raises questions. At what cost, all this wish-fulfilled excess of the TV age generation? And how on earth did it come to pass that the endearing picture of this boy escaped from the family's collection? 

The Barber's Chair by William Burton Lawson was included in the 2007 exhibition. The painting appears a time capsule the artist stumbled upon. A composition, through storefront plate-glass, that is worth more than a passing glance. A tan leather barber's chair at the center, rubbed shiny on its edges from wear. It has a massive chrome footrest, that, like the grill on a '50s Buick, seems a menacing grin or grimace. It's not really a stretch to say that the chair is endowed with an air of personage. It holds court with a surrounding overflow of interesting sidekicks and characters. Barstools from the Happy Days with foot rings for the tired feet of jazzy drinkers, a rocket age pedestal ashtray, linoleum floor and enamel cabinetry from a color-blind era in yellow and brown. Some Polaroids and a massive taxidermied fish on the gray paneled back wall.  A leaning broom, a Fedora hat. The carefully painted items are endless and intrinsic. A familiar red gumball machine, but empty.  The ashtray, the chairs, a trash can, all empty. A modern cheap plastic fan, its blades stopped.  Is that a reflection in the ornate mirror behind the barber's chair...? Maybe not. But a few clumps of hair on the floor hint at the quiet humanity of it all. The artist knows a composition and color scheme when he sees them. And in this time-trapped tableau, his meticulous hand preserves all of the colorful details for those who didn't take time to notice in real time. 

In an entry from 2001, Angel Mercado presents a sunsoaked fishing cottage that is reminiscent of the the East Coast lights of Edward Hopper. But only in the sunshine they share. Hopper was a post-war existentialist despite the occasional glow, but his early colorful row house pictures have the feeling you feel in Mercado's picture. We seek isolation as a tonic for the stress of city life. And Mercado's scene is splendid in that way. Pure sunlight and cool shadow in a harmony of mutual compliment. Primary color fields of blue sky, red roof and yellow grass are equally as melodious in their equitable distribution over the picture plane. The verve of the paintbrush, dashes out a row boat with minimal strain, a couple of blocks of black shadow, and a sweeping curve of white. The glee of existentialism, hold my beer.  

The Mysterious Amberson Age.

Booth Tarkington's coming-of-age novel Seventeen preserves an Indiana long gone, but contemporary to the times that spawned the first Hoosier Art Salon, one hundred years ago.   Before all the widespread store bought snacks, there was bread with butter and sprinkled sugar. Before there were several cars in every driveway, there were trolleys that linked far flung places like Irvington to the city, and at a conversational, leisurely pace. 

A magnificent seated Portrait of Booth Tarkington is included in the show. It presents the imposing man with trademark leather gloves and cigarette. Unfortunately, I did not note the artist or the year during my visit to the show. An online search revealed a photograph in the W. H. Bass Photo Collection with a similar pose. Different Tarkington portraits are in the collections of Smithsonian and Newfields. The bravura handling of the piece in the Stories of the Salon show is in the manner of  William Merritt Chase or Robert Henri, so perhaps it was  Wayman Adams, but he's already represented in the aforementioned Art Jury. But he did present a Tarkington portrait in the first Hoosier Salon in 1925. So perhaps it's an Adams, or a student of Adams or of William Forsyth, who also painting with a similar skill and abandon. Simon Paul Baus comes to mind, but perhaps his brush is looser yet.

In the gilded heyday of Hollywood, as Tarkington's Ambersons brightened cinema screens, Cecil Head was painting a meek and sober lamplight on a depression streetscape in our city. Street Corner at Midnight was exhibited in the 1942 Salon. A red brick corner store or bar, second floor apartments, sidewalks empty, all but rolled up. One parked automobile blends into the shadows of everything outside the lamp's midnight glow. The darkest shadows reserved for what lies beyond windows and door.

 

Mark Diekhoff,  June 21, 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.

Hoosier Salon 85th Annual Exhibit ‘Designed to Last’ at the Indiana State Museum

Eager to Please with Some Pleasant Surprises - 85th Annual Hoosier Salon 

originally appearing in The Ornomath Journal July 18, 2009

Many Hands, Fred Doloresco, 2009 Best of Show, 85th Annual Hoosier Salon

Classics, Penny French-Deal’s small oil was the first picture to capture my attention. The painting is nostalgic in its entirety. Its brushwork is impressionist, as is favored by most painters in the exhibition. The subject is a small town street of yesteryear. Arched windows and quaint awnings compose the turn of the century facades. Depression-era automobiles line the curb in colors bright enough to cheer up our modern memories of that sepia-toned era — candy apple red and a shiny royal blue.

Garden Chores by Ronald Mack is also an amalgamation of entirely nostalgic elements. Some charming farm girls dressed as in the 19th Century — either inspired from sometime else, formed from the artist’s imagination or maybe staged as a fussy tableau that Mack painted from life. The young ladies stroll through a vegetable garden, between the split rails, in the foreground of a slope-roofed farmstead shack through the long shadows of a setting sun.

Kathleen McMurray’s Pears with Blue and White Vase is composed not only of the namesake fruit and ubiquitous Japanese blue and white vessel, but also a marvelously rendered pewter spoon. The oil painting salutes Dutch still life masterfully, but that is as far as it goes.

Two award winning paintings hanging near one another reveal the eye of the jurors at play. Bahama Breezes by Denise Pettee-Frazier and Lifting Skies by David Tutwiler both exhibit a loose, sensual gauze of brushwork and a subject matter that inspires happy fuzzy memories of sunny holidays.

Snowy Day on Washington Street by Chris Newlund showcases the artist’s engaging and deft handling of the brush. The painting’s subject is sweet and is seductive almost to the point of being cringe-worthy, like Auguste Renoir can be at times. The chair barely exists at the painting’s edges, as the artist skillfully propels the viewer’s attention to the drama of the scene — a pregnant clump of grapes about to splash the coffee cup.

An idiosyncratic vision is displayed in the folk art collage by Ed McEndarfer, Storm Over Paradise. Decoration for decoration’s sake really — one motif is a line of Indiana-looking trees interspersed with half hidden palms.

William Lawson’s Autumn Shallows captures a natural moment of expressionist color — the bright oranges, deep blues and paling greens of an Indiana lake side in October. Despite the active color scheme, Lawson achieves an almost Chardon-like calm and harmony with the painting. The painting’s realism is all the more apparent with the nearby hanging of Marianne Glick's Abstract I. Glick’s abstract shares the same expressionist's colors but presents them to provoke a jagged and jarring effect, quite the opposite intention of the serene scene painted by Lawson.

The big, rolling bend of Lynn Dunbar’s Mighty Ohio River is painted of similar expressionist colors, shared also by her other entry, Little Pink Houses, Alton. This artist seems to utilize the colors in a more premeditated manner, as both pictures use them the same. But maybe the artist caught both scenes at a similar moment of light.

Virtuoso performances are awarded with the palette knife oil by Beth Forst, Cornrows Below Zero, and the pastel industrial impression and gossamer handling seen in The Ethanol Plant by Carol Strock-Wasson.

Dan Woodson has a sense of humor, I imagine. His My Summer Home begins at first glance as a visual riddle. The scene is a seek and find of the picture’s subject amid the visually busy and interesting monochrome crosshatching woodland branches that act a Cy Twombly camouflage. Woodson’s summer place is a tree house, with requisite swinging tire hanging from a branch, all covered in winter snow.

C. J. Fang’s Expressive Tranquility, not surprisingly, expresses tranquility. I found the composition of the acrylic painting to be among the most beautiful in the exhibit. The shapes of the clumps of marsh grass — the sky indivisible with the crystal still water. The golden ripe and fresh green shoots.

I wanted to enjoy the fabric collage Chicago, N. Michigan Ave. by Joel Fremion more. However, the work affected me less due to the inclusion of the word Prudential on a skyscraper and the composition’s starting point, the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago and the pre-fab drama of its stone lion.

By my count, there are thirteen pictures of the traditional ‘winding road’ genre all hung together on a section of wall. However, one work among them displays an unexpected turn. To state it simply, Alan Patrick’s Winding Road doesn’t. He’s painted a winding road stripped of all nostalgia and pre-packaged charm. It’s just a typical Indiana 3-way stop. A ‘T’ intersection. As if the blunting top of the ‘T’ wasn’t enough to frustrate a winding road, the stark left/right choice is further obscured by the heavy shade of the overhanging treeline.

Pamela Denny-Rohrbach’s Bittersweet, Vanitas I expresses joy. A joy in painting, a joy in the objects and color of life, a joy in living. She’s composed a still life that’s a roller coaster of movement similar to some of Cezanne’s lopsided cornucopias. Her approach contains no shortcut. All included is intricate and wild. The shrinking jagged oak leaves, an almost obscenely decorative fabric tumbling from the table in a myriad of folds, complicated oriental porcelain, an odd King Neptune fruit bowl.

The 2009 ‘Best of Show’ is Fred Doloresco’s Many Hands. Doloresco’s skills as a painter are marred a bit by the overwhelming nostalgia of his subject. Even the picture's framing seems to aspire to imitate an earlier age. The result, unfortunately, is somewhat gaudy and overly sentimental to my tastes — a mash of Milet’s L’Angelus and similar pictures with Monet's haystacks, all in a picture frame fit for a king. The picture’s scale is admirable. Indeed it shares the ambitious size seen in the works that make up the Society of Western Artists exhibit showing concurrently down the hall. The picture’s painterly effects can entertain, to be sure, if you stand nice and close. But at a distance, Doloresco’s harvest peasants have become too familiar to excite all that much.

See also:

Hoosier Art Salon website

Indiana State Museum Exhibits

Collectors Gather for Epic Art Auction - Irvington Indiana Art News

2023 Spring Sale of Historic Indiana Art 

 Sunbathers  Simon Baus  oil on b

(Originally appeared in The Weekly View Community Newspaper, Vol 14, No 16, April 21, 2023)

INDIANAPOLIS – The Spring Sale of Historic Indiana Art occurred on the afternoon of Sunday, April 16 at The Arch on the near eastside of downtown Indianapolis. Over one hundred artworks covered the walls of the spacious venue and were put up for sale for those in attendance or bidding online. Co-hosted by Fine Estate Art and Jacksons Auction & Real Estate Company, the sale consisted of mostly Indiana-related paintings and other two-dimensional works that were either purchased by collectors or admired as if a museum exhibition by the more casual art lovers in the crowd.

A great variety of Indiana’s historic art and artists were represented including the stately, century-old views of Indiana beech forests by William McKendree Snyder, fiery first trees of autumn in woodland views by Hoosier Group artists J. Ottis Adams and Otto Stark, and bright colored impressions of summer by Irvington master, William Forsyth. Speaking further of Forsyth, two examples of his quirky and wonderful watercolor greeting cards were also sold. One of the cards, an art nouveau mini-masterpiece of an idyllic waterfront included the humorous New Years caption in the artist’s recognizable hand, ‘1st 1916 – To The Forsyths From The Forsyths’. It was sent to nearby neighbors who shared not only Forsyth’s Irvington neighborhood, but also his friendship and the same last name.

Also noteworthy were two Brown County exhibition-size paintings possessing a warm, soft-focus grandeur by Adolph Robert Shulz, a bi-colored pinwheel of red and white summer flowers in a still life floral by Leota Loop and several stunning (and large!) architectural streetscapes by Harry Davis.

For specialty collectors, original James Whitcomb Riley book illustration artworks were sold including an Ethel Franklin Betts’ unusual Mother and Child, in which both the face of mother and child are hidden and unseen due to the artist’s daring composition. Will Vawter was not only a favorite Riley book illustrator, but also a member of the Brown County Group of artists. Several of his commercial illustration originals were sold such as the grayscale gouache Easy Chair (along with a copy of the J.W. Riley book in which it appeared) and the graphite sketch of a yesteryear’s slacker, Daydreamer.

The drama-infused glitter of Glenn Cooper Henshaw’s dynamic nocturnal pastel drawings, particularly Woolworth Building, New York, were popular with a crowd of excited young collectors who sat in the front few rows and snatched them up one after the next as the gavel fell.

Contemporary and still living artists sold well including 1980s Indianapolis artist Stephen Stoller’s street person portrait Outside the Corner Store which reached the pre-auction estimate maximum with its winning bid.

Of particular interest to my eyes was Jan Zwara’s virtuoso Brown County Winter Landscape. A Steve Mannheimer art column from the Indianapolis Star back in 1993 discussed this talented and troubled artist at length. Like Vincent Van Gogh, this artist suffered periods of mental illness. Indeed, Zwara was confined to Indianapolis’ Central State Hospital in 1938 for treatment. His Winter Landscape denotes no distress, but rather a balanced and poised perfection. Close inspection of the painting reveals the singularly unique and novel brushstrokes of a beautiful mind.

-Mark Diekhoff

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.