Art Collection of Irvington Historical Society

Self Portrait by William F. Kaeser

Exhibit of Artworks from the Irvington Historical Society Collection

Currently at the Bona Thompson Center, is the exhibit An Artistic Legacy: Selections from the Irvington Historical Society Collection.  The show presents a selection of artworks from its permanent collection or on loan. 

The show coincides with the concurrent exhibit The Lost Photographs of Osbert Sumner, which continues at the same location.

Works include historic examples by members of the Irvington Group which was active from 1928 through 1937, and noteworthy pieces by more recent and contemporary artists, most with strong ties to Irvington.

Installation view detail from An Artistic Legacy show,
including Dorothy Morlan's Grey Landscape, far left

A wonderful Dorothy Morlan painting, of what may be a bend of the Ohio River, shows a bluff above a couple of cottage roofs, covered in snow, looking down over a vast river valley. The picture, Grey Landscape in this hanging, is called In the Valley (Harmony in Gray), 1933, in the book Skirting the Issue by Newton and Weiss. It is indeed musical in its interplay of varying shades of blue and gray, from very light in the skies and on the water, to more medium gray in the distant river banks, and finally a turquoise in the foreground that hosts a few thin trees that cling to a few leaves on the uppermost tips of their branches. The artist was painting near the Ohio in this period, as her Through the Trees Near Hanover appeared in the 36th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at the Richmond (IN) Art Museum in 1934.

There are two portraits of Irvington Group painter William Kaeser. One is his own Self Portrait, c. 1960, showing him at middle age, graying hair, smoking a pipe wearing a gray cardigan sweater. The canvas is brightened and its mood enlivened by the bright orange shirt he wears, and the way it plays off the small painting's teal background. Most known for his early social realistic landscapes and circus motifs, the portrait displays his sure and fluid handling of paint, where his transitions from light to shade appear skillfully executed by his touch.

Portrait of William Kaeser by Cecil Head

The second Portrait of William Kaeser, c. 1940. is by Cecil Head. Although Head did not exhibit in the Irvington Group shows, the Whiteland artist had a long association with Kaeser. They shared studio space, along with Indianapolis artist Floyd Hopper, in downtown Indianapolis on Market Street in their early days in the 1930s, and continued to exhibit together in their final years some forty years later, in a group they called The Five. 

Head's portrait shows Kaeser nearly life-size, as a young artist smoking a pipe. The play of light and shadow seems the primary study of the painting, with Kaeser's white shirt collar, the side of his neck and face and the glint off the stem of the pipe catching the brightest attention of the artist's brush. Kaeser's face, turned away, is lost in the shadow of the dark surrounding background. The portrait is similar to a self portrait by Head, and a portrait of he did of Hopper, from the same period, both exhibited decades later at the Southside Art League.

Sycamores on West Farm by Frederick Polley

Another Irvington Group artist, Frederick Polley, is well represented in the show, with three works of three varying media; painting, etching and drawing. The artist revealed his own art origins in a 1920s newspaper article that was profusely illustrated with many of his etchings. Working as a telegraph operator in a small Illinois town, he observed an artist, new to town, sketching various buildings for a feature in the newspaper. He was inspired to try his hand at sketching and found that he had talent for drawing buildings. It was a discovery and a passion that would lead to his own career in future years, when he provided etchings and drawings to be published in the Indianapolis Sunday Star across from the editorial page, for years.

In this exhibit, his colorful oil painting, Sycamores on West Farm, is first to capture one's attention with its color. The autumn scene is of a rolling slope of foreground, so often seen with him, and in this picture, a retreating row of sycamores. The gleaming white bark is bright in sunshine, amid an otherwise warm study of the fading colors as summer turns to winter. Tan and beige ground, some final yellow leaves, brown shadows and dark orange treelines in the hazy gray distance.

Polley's etching, Getting Out in the Country, c. 1927, was one his works that appeared in the Sunday Star.  There is a poetry to his composition of a towering, almost foreboding, tree on one side, mirrored by its diminutive twin on the other, in the deep, receding perspective. Between the two, the tiny hamlet of a farm –  house, barn, shade tree and split rail fence –  that huddles beneath the open expanse of open sky.  The etching portrays the same rolling topography that is familiar in many Polleys, with the massive foreground tree atop a grassy rise that plunges the eye toward the more distant and detailed narrative of the homestead at the center the piece. 

 

The Ice House, Irvington by William Lawson

A current view of Irvington, by a current resident artist, is seen in the oil painting The Ice House, Irvington, 2019, by William Lawson.  Born in Indianapolis, he studied at Herron, and currently maintains a studio on an upper floor of the historic drug store building at the intersection of Bonna and Audubon. Lawson has been painting in Irvington since his return to Indiana in 2018 after living and painting in Seattle, Washington for a number of years.

Lawson paints his Ice House, not from Ritter Avenue facing the street, but from the other side, along the railroad tracks behind the building. He often finds points of interest off the beaten track as his many paintings of the city's alleyways attest.  Views aside railroad tracks are also recur in works by this artist over the years. The light of early spring is captured as it shines on the simple, harmonious color of the scene.  The red block tower contrasts with the emerging grass. The precise stiffness of the telephone poles and roof-lines is softened by the thin billow of clouds, the fuzzy treeline in the distance and the dusty gravel along the tracks.  An old tire and other litter are not unsightly, but noteworthy to his brush. The railroad tracks do not escape, but run through. They seem to summon somewhere. Either direction, come or go, something else to see.

North Arlington Avenue at Pleasant Run by Rachel May Blount Conner

Perhaps the oldest painting of the neighborhood in the collection is Rachel May Blount Conner's North Arlington Avenue Bridge at Pleasant Run, 1885. The rustic scene, painted in a self-taught folk art style, may first appear alien to any current views at that location.  But walks along the creek in the area of Pleasant Run Golf Course do show the similar details of exposed tree roots along the washed away creek-side and eroded walls on steep inclines beside the water. The open green surrounded by trees like in her painting still exist in the southern edge of the golf course today.  The main interest in the painting is its capture of the rudimentary bridge and its stone block abutments at either end that traversed the creek at that time.

The Bona Thompson Center by Ginny Taylor Rosner

The Bona Thompson Center, 2007, a gum bichromate photograph on Lanaquarelle paper by Ginny Taylor Rosner was part of a series of works created of Irvington landmarks for the former Legends Restaurant. The work, abstracted by its extreme close up presentation, shows vines growing up the side of the building and is a study in cream yellow and green.  

Robert Selby's 1929, The Forsyth's Backyard is wildly painted with expressive slashing strokes. The picture captures the spring season with pink blossoming trees and bright new leaves. Selby exhibited with the Irvington Group, and was son-in-law to William Forsyth and brother-in-law to Constance Forsyth, both of whom are also represented in this show. The Backyard is of the Forsyth home at the corner of Washington Street and Emerson Avenue, which is the location of a gas station today.

The exhibit also contains work by three other Irvington Group members, all watercolor landscapes. Clifton Wheeler's Hillside with Cabin, Hilah Drake Wheeler's Devil's Gultch – Estes Park,  and Charles George Yeager's Untitled view of a village beside a lake surrounded by rocky hills.

Benton House by Kathleen Biale

The exhibited collection also includes works by Harry Davis, John Wesley Hardrick, Florence Bartley Smithburn, Patte Owings, James Lynch, E. Roger Frey, Kathleen Biale, Phyllis Zimmerman, and Carl Zimmerman. and continues through the end of the year.  

Mark Diekhoff, November 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.

'Irvington Group' Artists at Auction 2025

Gemini AI generated for illustrative purposes only

Historic Irvington Group Artists at Auction –  Autumn, 2025 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William Forsyth as a srudent

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

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

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

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

Mark Diekhoff, November 2025

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.