William Lawson Paintings in Art Collected by Ken and Gaynell Collier-Magar

Yellow House and Garden by William Lawson

A Yellow House to Catch the Eye.

On Audubon Avenue south of Washington Street in the heart of Irvington, at number 218 on the west side of the street, is the home of longtime residents Ken and Gaynell Collier-Magar. 

Ken, recently retired, practiced law for many years and Gaynell is a former landscaping company owner and currently instructs yoga at the Irvington Wellness Center.

Gaynell's landscaping background is apparent in the beautiful and organic design of her gardens which surround the home on all sides. The house itself, a pale yellow Dutch Colonial Revival trimmed in white, has yet another attractive feature – the large and inviting front porch.  

Some history of the house, built in 1909, was provided by Dr. Victor Vollrath, when he knocked on the front door, some years ago, announcing to Ken and Gaynell that he used to live there. In fact, his family owned the place for fifty years.

As a child born in 1916, it was the only childhood home he'd ever know, growing up there with his large family. In the neighborhood, Victor was first exposed to the practice of medicine when, still a boy, he ran errands for a doctor living down the street. Doc Walter Kelly who served patients in that home-office around the corner, inspired young Victor to become physician himself. 

On that day he knocked on Ken and Gaynell's door almost a lifetime later, Dr. Vollrath presented them with a photograph of his family in front of the house circa 1920. 

The Vollrath family looks south from the walkway leading to their front door in the photo. Mom has the newest baby in her arms. The four boys, each a head taller than the next youngest, in front of their mother. Victor, the youngest boy standing, was at the fore. The father's pride is apparent as he stands by his family's side, one hand in pocket, one smoking a cigar. A couple door doors down to the north, the wall of a neighboring building – that is, The Snug today.

The Vollrath Family, 218 S. Audubon   c. 1920

The photograph hangs just inside the front door of the Collier-Magars. It is not alone, that image of the front yard of the yellow house, many paintings are close at hand. The house and yard, with its history of that moment frozen in black and white, would find the true color of summer and a garden at the end of artist's brush. 

A Closed Down World and Open Garden.

In 2021, the world was gripped in a stifling COVID lock-down. But in the out-of-doors, a fresh air and a freedom called. People jogged, people rode bicycles, people walked their dogs. 

William Lawson did what he normally does. He worked outside, as an artist painting pictures at his easel.  En plein air, it is called. Meaning 'in the open air,' before his subject. His subject one day was the yellow house.

Lawson painted 218 S. Audubon undetected by the Collier-Magars. The street scene painter of Irvington  was not known to them at the time. It was either spring or summer when he painted the picture, as the blue sky has fair weather clouds and the leaves on the trees are green.  He painted from the sidewalk just north of the house and he peers over a high hedge onto the house from a slight angle. 

The Yellow House - 218 S. Audubon by William Lawson

The gambrel roof, the white gable end and the dentil molding on the yellow house center the focus in the picture. Of playful note, is the string of Tibetan prayer flags. They stretch across, just below the porch roof, bleached from the sun.

The painting was not to go totally unnoticed though, as a friend and neighbor of Ken and Gaynell stopped to chat about the picture with Lawson still at the easel. And as it turns out, Lawson presented the painting to her with instructions to give to the owners at a later date. 

About a year later,  the 22nd Annual Irvington Garden Tour in 2022 was taking place on a sunny Sunday afternoon in June.  William Lawson was painting in the alleyway between the same yellow house and the home just to the north. The emphasis of subject of that new painting was actually the flowery hedge of the next door neighbor's yard, but during the event, which included the Collier-Magar garden as a featured stop on the tour, Lawson was to meet Ken and Gaynell for the first time. 

They would learn of the earlier painting of their own house that day, which was still in possession of the friend and neighbor. But soon after, they would receive it, and they would commission their own Lawson painting. A vibrant and overflowing view of Gaynell's south side-yard garden at its peak season. Another commission would follow of the front yard garden, also in full bloom (top of page). 

The Yellow House Side Garden by William Lawson

The three paintings of the yellow house, together and united like siblings, in Ken and Gaynell's family of artworks. They share a family resemblance;  bright yellow walls, white trim and sunlit gardens.  The paintings would be the foundation of their growing collection of William Lawson works.

A Front Porch View and Wider World.

In the spring of 2021, as the pandemic lingered, William Lawson took up residence in a second-story apartment atop the old drug store building on the southwest corner of Audubon at Bonna. From this central vantage point in Irvington, he would continue creating paintings. His primary direction, as always, was as a plein air painter. The drive of his focus was often overlooked scenes in Irvington and around Indianapolis.

Now living on the same block as the Collier-Magars, he was invited one day, as he returned to his apartment with easel on his back, to join a group on the front porch amid cigar smoke, cognac and conversation. Lawson accepted the invitation and was to return often to join in the always changing cast of neighbors, friends and family, and even passers-by, in the shade of the yellow house porch.

Lawson would paint a scene right from the porch called Old Storefront on Audubon which Ken and Gaynell would acquire. The subject is the old business buildings across the way. 

Old Storefront on Audubon by William Lawson

They would also visit his studio apartment to look at his other works created in the neighborhood, around Indianapolis and even his earlier years spent in Seattle. They would collect his piece View from Desolation Peak, a mountaintop scene in Washington State of a fire watch mountain top made famous by Jack Kerouac in his novel Desolation Angels. The painting shows the golden scrub of vegetation underfoot on a mountain slope with a few skinny evergreens. It looks out to a distant lake and cascading blue hills beneath towering clouds and diffuse sunlight at the horizon.

View From Desolation Peak by William Lawson

Two Indianapolis pictures they would collect are Bridge Over White River, a palette knife oil painting showing the stone arches of a downtown bridge with the new Mariott Hotel breaking the line of sky in the background. And Old Northside Alley, a painting of a favorite motif for Lawson, the urban alleyway, this time in fall. The orange leaves of trees add further color to the central focus, the contrast of a red garage against the green one behind. 

Bridge Over White River by William Lawson

Ken and Gaynell would acquire neighborhood scenes from Lawson's studio including Houses on Whittier, a picture of three mutely-hued homes in shades of white, gray and pink, aside each other in deep angular profile. There is an abundant punctuation of blooming sunflowers and hydrangeas in the foreground.  

Rooftops in Winter - Irvington by William Lawson

Another picture with subtle hues of white, gray and brown – of snow covered roofs and bare trees – in the scene, Rooftops in Winter – Irvington. Its color, a green house, and in the distance, a yellow one, and blue, possess the promise of a coming spring despite the grip of a monotone winter.

In the scene Irvington Railroad in Autumn, the harmony and chaos of color changing is balanced by the precision of the receding railroad tracks and color of the gravel bed.  

Irvington Railroad in Autumn by William Lawson

Cezanne and the Quiet Lives of Apples and Pears.

Although primarily a painter of the out-of-doors, Lawson does studio work as well. His inspiration lately is Paul Cezanne and that artist's still lifes of fruit. Lawson has created numerous small painted studies, preparatory collages, and most recently, larger format paintings that study solidity, color and form.

Still Life with Apples, Pears and an Orange by William Lawson

The Collier-Magars have collected several works from this series, including small paper collages that serve as the first studies for Lawson's most recent larger paintings. And also the smaller paintings; Still Life with Pears and Still Life with Apples, Pears and an Orange.

Of particular interest, related to these still lifes and Cezanne, is a unique Lawson in their collection, Cezanne's Studio. The small picture is a vibrant homage to the master's last workspace in Aix-en-Provence, France. It shows fruit and tablecloth, and an actual statuette and earthenware that populated many of Cezanne's paintings. 

Cezanne's Studio by William Lawson

That Never Ending Spark of Inspiration.

Lawson's friendship with his neighbors, Ken and Gaynell Collier-Magar, and their patronage of his work, began on a sidewalk, then an alley, and finally on a front porch. A porch in Irvington that has inspired Lawson to paint scenes of Irvington while standing in its shade. A porch where Tibetan flags murmur quiet prayers for peace, inspired by the wind.  

Lawson was the inspiration for Ken Collier-Magar to take up the brushes again, after many years, and create a painting. His small study, loaded with primary colors, Amalphi Coast, is a painting of a place so stunning and beautiful, so universally appreciated, that the stretch of southern Italy's coastline is UNESCO listed, as of global significance.

Amalphi Coast by Ken Collier-Magar

Maybe not as renowned, or as universally accepted, are the many sights and scenes of Irvington, Indianapolis and Indiana that appear on William Lawson's list of places. His list of railroad tracks, alleyways, rooftops and bridges is a list preserved in oils and protected on canvas. It is a list he has created over his first thirty years of painting. 

The most recent entry on the list that Ken and Gaynell have collected is his View from Highland Park, painted this past fall. 

The scene is from the Holy Cross neighborhood on the city's east side. It captures the glow of a maple in October, and the tip of a green house and its red chimney, jutting in the sky.  A sky that is shared by high-rises, a church steeple and electric poles. A blue sky, and sidewalk, green grass...the inspirations go on an on.

View From Highland Park by William Lawson

Mark Diekhoff, January 2026 

Thanks to Ken and Gaynell Collier-Magar and William Lawson for sharing details and images about the history of the collection 

Dedicated to my brother Edward, who has concluded his career as a physician of many decades with his retirement today. 

M.D. 1/2/26 

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 – Oct. 20 1922 to July 2, 2023

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

Art Ghosts Stir in Irvington.

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

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

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

A show called simply Lucille Morehouse. 

Installation View Lucille Morehouse
at Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

The World of Lucille Morehouse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She would never exhibit her collection during her life.

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

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

Back Where She Started, Tippecanoe County, Indiana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orrin Draven in Lucille Morehouse exhibit
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kaethe Kollwitz, Folge Tod
Art Museum of Greater Lafayette

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nakedness of Thought.

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

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025

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.

Constance Coleman Richardson – Indiana's Edward Hopper?

Street Light (now called Streetlight), Constance Coleman Richardson, 1930
collection Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields

A  Painting with Staying Power.

During recent deep-dive research into the artistic life and times of Irvington's Dorothy Morlan, the painter I believe to be Indiana's first modernist painter, I came across another artist, also a modernist,  also from Irvington, a female as well, but from the next generation, and a mesmerizing painting by her hand. While in the book Skirting the Issue by Newton and Weiss, the most comprehensive source on Indiana's women artists, and learning about some artists associated with Morlan's career, namely Emma B. King, Lucy Taggart, Helene Hibben and Winifred Adams, I came across this uniquely captivating picture by Constance Coleman Richardson, Street Light. 

It was only later I recalled a conversation with Irvington landscape painter William B. Lawson, who some months or perhaps a year prior had mentioned an interesting painting he had enjoyed at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.  He spoke of the same painting, Street Light, which depicted a nocturnal street scene in northside Indianapolis.  

Edward Hopper's name comes up when Constance Coleman Richards is mentioned online.  They hang together in the Newfields collection in the American Painting  room. I was familiar with his work, but not hers. Street Light would be my starting place. 

She painted the early work in 1930, and it was appreciated immediately upon its initial exhibition in 1931 at the Indiana Artists exhibition at Herron. The picture remains perhaps the most celebrated canvas of the artist's long career. It was also to demonstrate Coleman Richardson's affinity toward a soothing, grounding light or environment, in particular focus in Street Light, that would anchor her figures to their place in the world, even if the place was dark or even if they were alone. It was a signature characteristic in many of her works throughout the 1930s and beyond.

Coleman's Early Life and Irvington.

Constance Coleman was born in 1905 in Berlin, Germany, to mother Juliet Brown Coleman and father Christopher B. Coleman.

Her mother, Juliet, was granddaughter to Jacob B. Julian, one of the founders of Irvington as a village on the eastern outskirts of Indianapolis in the 1870s. The town was named after Washington Irving, a favorite author of Mr. Julian. The initial residence he had built there, one of the first in the area, was a Second Empire gem at 29 S. Audubon. Unfortunately, the stately period piece was razed in the 1950s to make way for an apartment building.   

Her father, Christoper B. Coleman, was educated at Yale, the University of Chicago and Columbia, earning degrees from all three including a PhD in history. He was employed in the history department and then as a vice president at Butler University from 1900 through 1919, when the college was still in Irvington. During that time, Mr. Coleman furthered his education with studies in Germany, at which time Constance, his first child, was born. The family would return to Irvington in 1906 where they would remain until 1920 at which time Mr. Coleman took a job heading the history and political science department at Allegheny College, presumably in Pennsylvania.

Constance Coleman would be educated at the Laurel School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, around the time of her fathers stint at Allegheny, and then at Vassar College in New York and finally at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. While she was at Vassar, her father and family had returned to Indiana when he accepted the first of several positions with the State of Indiana from 1924 through 1942; director of the State Historical Bureau, secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, and director of the Indiana State Library. 

Mr. Coleman would publish several books and give many public lectures over the years demonstrating a wide-ranging interest in local, national and world history. Subjects included archaeology of Indian mounds, the history of Sunday School in the United States and the 'spurious,' his description, Constantine the Great. 

Miss Constance Coleman would be noted in the society pages of the Indianapolis papers often during the time of her education, artistic debut and marriage in the early 1930s.  Indeed, in 1925, an AP wire story reported that while at Vassar, Coleman was among twenty-four beautiful sophomores taking part in an annual commencement day ritual at the college. She, and the other girls, would bear a 300-foot daisy chain of woven flowers and mountain laurel in a decorative procession to escort graduates on their special day.

By 1930, with school behind her, she would have her first major exhibit, in Philadelphia, and create her first major painting, Street Light.

A Transformative and Festive Period (Despite the Market Crash).

Constance Coleman began a remarkable period of personal and artistic change just months after the great stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression.  The times were anything but depressing for Miss Coleman though, if you read her news clippings from 1930, the year the artist and her art debuted to the wider world.  Her personal life was filled with festivities and travel, and as her courtship deepened with a young art historian from Detroit, Michigan, Edgar Richardson, who she had met while she studied in Philadelphia.

The January 31, 1930, Indianapolis News reported that Miss Coleman had two paintings accepted for display at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. The pictures included were Crescendo and The Bridge Party. The next day, The Indianapolis Times ran a similar news item that provided the detail of Miss Coleman's current studio at the D.A.R. chapter house (Daughters of the American Revolution) at 824 N. Meridian in Indianapolis, and mentioned the submitted work The Bridge Party had been on display at the prior Indiana Artists show at Herron Art Institute. It also described the other picture, Crescendo, as depicting gladiolas in the various states of unfolding.

Miss Coleman attended a lavish costume ball on the rooftop garden of the Hotel Severin in downtown  Indianapolis on March 29th. The annual event was sponsored by the Indiana Artists Club and required fancy dress, and had décor designed by artist Elmer Taflinger with an Asian theme that year. Two art students, Miss Margaret Cornell and Miss Katheryn Peden, were photographed in their opulent outfits for a preview of the event on the society page of The Indianapolis News on March 15, in a demonstration of glamorous extravagance, despite any economic slowdown or tough times. 

Over the summer, Miss Coleman spent a few weeks at Rock Point on Vermont's Lake Champlain  according to an August 7, Indianapolis News society notice. 

Both Miss Coleman and her future husband Mr. Richardson attended a dinner party to honor Spanish artist, Jose Drudis-Biada, who was traveling from an exhibition of his paintings in Chicago to Los Angeles for another exhibit. The dinner with sizable guest-list was held in the Green Room at the Spink Arms Hotel also in Indianapolis. 

Constance Coleman (at the time) with Street Light (1930)
at Indiana Artists Exhibit at Herron, 1931  (source Indpls Star)

A Street Light is Born.

In the last weeks of February and the entire month of March 1931, the 24th Annual Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute of Art was widely covered in the Indianapolis and regional papers. 

On March 1, The Richmond Item reported that honorable mention artworks in the Indiana Artists included an oil painting by Constance Coleman, Street Light.

A description of both of Coleman's pictures is included in an Indianapolis News review of the show on March 7. The unnamed writer discusses the improvement of certain artists from prior years' exhibits, notable Coleman, as follows, 

“Her work, from the promising impressionistic bits which she first exhibited, has grown to strikingly beautiful and inimitable tenancies. Her Street Light, to which was given honorable mention, is a cool green composition, with smoothly blended flat surfaces and amazing highlights. Lone Man, her second example, is an arresting study in pastel shaded surfaces, in which she has allowed the sweep of a reservoir curve and the blue expanse of a sky suffice for the detail which she might have been justified in inserting.”

The next day, on March 8, in her 'In the World of Art' column in The Star, Lucille Morehouse discusses both works by Coleman in great detail. Her observations are particularly thoughtful, and will be quoted at length as follows,

“I like exceedingly the two paintings by Constance Coleman. Since anything and everything that is a little bit out of the ordinary is called modernistic these days, the same mantle-like term that covers both sins and virtues would doubtless be applied to these two examples of excellent work. If every modernist were only as individual in his style and also had something to say that merited the saying as much as does the thought back of Miss Coleman's work, then we should all welcome the moderns with open arms.”

Morehouse continues by detailing the pictures,

“Both of the paintings...seem to be merely a fresh new way to present realism, the one a park scene after night entitled Street Light, the other a partial view of a great reservoir. (Regarding the latter, Lone Man, she adds) On one side the gray cement of the storage basin slopes downward, on the other side is the downward slope of the grass terrace, yellow green as if in early springtime.   At the dividing line between cement and grass slope stands a lone man – a circumstance which furnishes the picture's title.” 

And further about Lone Man and its technique, 

“In the background curls of smoke rise from factory stacks. The paint is applied smoothly and there is particularly fine balance of lights and darks.”

On March 22, in the Star Magazine supplement to the Sunday paper in Indianapolis, included a pictorial spread of select artists with their artworks at the exhibit and Constance Coleman and Street Light are shown.

On March 29, in a follow up article in The Star by Lucille Morehouse about other works in the 24th Indiana Artists besides the prize winners, a photograph of Street Light by Coleman is presented as an aside, under the caption, “Tonal Effects are Distinctive.”

The news regarding Constance Coleman and her Street Light and Lone Man had not yet run its course.  On March 31, 1931, The Indianapolis News reported that the Indiana Artists exhibit, just closed, was the second most popular exhibit recorded at Herron, behind only a St. Gaudens one-man sculpture show from many years prior. Total attendance was 8,686. And that year a popular picture prize was awarded to the work that accumulated the most votes from the attending public. Constance Coleman's Street Light was the fan favorite, receiving 136 of the total 690 votes cast. And her Lone Man took fifth place, as well. Homer Davisson's In Blossom Time earned second place with 40 votes. 

The Fine Balance of Light, Life and Love.

For Constance Coleman, the remainder of 1931, at least as reported in the newspapers, would revolve around her engagement and marriage to Edgar Preston Richardson of Detroit. An August 26, 1931, Indianapolis Times article announces the couple's wedding date as September 15. It mentions that Mr. Richardson had attended Williams College and was then employed as a director at the Historical Bureau of Indiana, where Coleman's father was employed. By the eve of the wedding, on September 14, The Indianapolis News reported that Mr. Richardson was now relocated and employed as assistant curator at the Institute of Arts at Detroit.

Different wedding photos of the bride, Constance Coleman Richardson, graced the pages of all three Indianapolis newspapers on or about the date of her wedding.  Her pretty and younger sister Martha Julian Coleman was to be bridesmaid, and her only attendant. Palms and ferns would decorate the church and the colors for the Coleman girls would be peach and ivory. A complete detail of Coleman's post-wedding outfit, her dress for travel to her honeymoon, was covered in the wedding day Indianapolis Times article on September 15, 1931; “a bright green silk suit trimmed in brown buttons, a brown felt Eugenie hat, with small coque feather at the side, and brown accessories.” 

The elaborate coverage of her wedding details in the papers attests to the place in society for Miss Coleman by the time of her wedding due to her mother's lineage, her father's position in academia and with the State of Indiana and her growing reputation as an artist.

By January 16, 1932, The Indianapolis News reports that, having relocated to Michigan with her husband after their marriage, Constance Coleman Richardson had become allied with a group of Detroit artists and had already exhibited paintings in a Michigan artists exhibition held at the Detroit Institute of Arts that month. The News quotes an art writer for the Detroit News who said of her pictures in the show, 

“Among the new names this year...(is) Constance Coleman Richardson, who makes a startling pattern, approaching an abstraction with chair backs and a table with several objects upon it, intensified by the use of a strong light. Even more impressive is the precision with which she makes a striking pattern of gladiola stalks, and the daring elimination in her (picture of a)...lone man on a dreary stretch of beach, all three entries expressing that individuality of viewpoint and approach which separates the distinguished from the mediocre.”

By March 7, 1932, Mrs. Coleman Richardson would present new work in Indiana when she exhibited the canvas, Woodruff Place, at the 25th Indiana Artists show at Herron.  The success of the work would be covered by all three major Indianapolis papers, repeated the notoriety of Street Light, if not that picture's eventual importance. Woodruff Place was called outstanding by The Indianapolis Times in their March 12, 1932 review of the show. On the same day, The Indianapolis News, in a review headlined “In General Modern” (quoting Wilbur D. Peat about the show at his Herron gallery), chose Coleman Richardson's Woodruff Place as the photo representative of the exhibition in the paper. 

source - The Indianapolis News

About that picture and another work by the artist, the writer signed only as M.B. says,

“It is a study in those quiet grays and drab tones so common in any street scene, and so rarely duplicated in painting. Mrs. Richardson's other entry called Wind is a highly colored, spirited picture of a flag at the top of a building mast – fluted out firmly by a strong – practically a visible – gust of air.”

Later in the spring, the exhibition in part travels to other destinations around the state. The May 8, Muncie Sunday Star covers Coleman Richardson as follows,

“One of the most unusual pictures is Wind...It pictures a large flag billowing in the wind from the top of a high pole against a background of bright blue sky in which are white, billowy clouds. The glimpse of the top of the building adds to the effect of height, while the clouds and the flag add motion. The bright colors of this picture are attractive and pleasing.”

Work from this show, including by Mrs. Coleman Richardson would also travel to Baltimore, Maryland to be exhibited for a first of its kind show of Indiana art at a Montgomery Wards department store in the city, as reported by Lucille Morehouse in The Indianapolis Star on July 24.

The next season, Coleman Richardson again creates a show stopper with light effects for the 26th Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron in Indianapolis.  Lucille Morehouse said the work Storm in the Notch possessed “dramatic quality” in her March 19th column.  In a human interest column in The Indianapolis News called “Hoosier Homespun” under a sub heading 'The Art Crowd', the writer comments on the same painting writing, “Provoking most comment among artists was Constance Coleman Richardson's spectacular little Storm in the Notch...”

The painting was detailed in an earlier review in The News, dated March 6, 1933, 

“ Perhaps the most spectacular – certainly the most arresting – piece in the entire group of seventy-nine oils is Constance Coleman Richardson's little Storm in the Notch. Though the statement is meant in the most complementary sense possible, Mrs. Richardson has a sense of showmanship that scenic designers would do well to study. There is a radiance almost phosphorescent in the splash of electric white showing above the hill. One takes it apart – it is only a composition in nicely tones grays. But as a whole it is positively stirring in its effect!” 

Existentialism with a Heart.

Other paintings by the artist can be examined to study Coleman's Richardson's continuing fascination with the balance of light and dark, one's place in the universe and the natural power of scene.

Particularly of note are Fourth of July (1944) in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art collection and Hot Sun (1947), in the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields collection. 

Her work has been compared to that of Edward Hopper.  He was creating his first sensations, including House by the Railroad and Nighthawks at about the same time Coleman Richardson created Street Light and Hot Sun. There is a startling quiet to them both, a whispering quality that they would each continue to explore in their own way.   

But it's not really the stark plight of Hopper that Coleman painted with her solitary figures, her dark and bright scenes, her encapsulations of natural might and scale. But rather, as Lucille Morehouse suggested, a realism, an existential realism I would argue, of the essential human nature of individual being, a being mixed with the solace of an other;  a nature, a person, a light. 

Coleman portrays a grounding comfort of earth beneath one's feet, the sun's warmth, even if amid nearby shade or overwhelming firmament. Again, as Morehouse said, the “particularly fine balance of lights and darks.”

Additionally, to contrast Coleman Richardson with her contemporary Edward Hopper,  his nocturnal set pieces are often theatrical, with the staginess of mannequins placed in storefront windows, the promise they offer comes at a heavy price. His florescent baths of interrogative, sterile night light or his pagan days of sun-worshiping subjects exposing an alienated anxiousness, almost painful to witness. 

Coleman Richardson's lone figures are not lonely or alone. They often bask in a halo of light, that can be experienced as a climber feels a mountain, both grounded and challenged, firm rock underfoot and wide open above.  The opposite of claustrophobic.  A bit unnerving, yes “stirring” –  that “fine balance” of light and dark.

Mark Diekhoff, September 2025

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