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.

Dorothy Morlan in the 1920s – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 3

Expressions in Blue – Dorothy Morlan in the 1920s 

Lucille Morehouse, in her Indianapolis Star art column on March 8, 1920, covering the current Indiana Artists exhibit at the Herron Institute, noted that the prize winning works that year were mostly smaller in size than in past years. The two main winners were both small watercolors; William Forsyth's Woods in Autumn and Francis F. Brown's A Cloudy Day.   Three artists were noted as Honorable Mentions including Dorothy Morlan for her small in size canvas, about 9 by 12 inches, Winter Evening. Morehouse notes the picture's small size, but large vision, depicting “...a wide stretch of blue-shadowed snowy field.” 

A lingering post war thrift and rationing hangover may explain, in part, the downsized art.

A Meeting of Kindred Neighbors.

A year and a half later, the current artistic inclinations of Morlan are described in a long July 10, 1921 Star column by Lucille Morehouse titled 'Studio of Local Artists Reveals Treasures – Work of Dorothy Morlan Shows Wealth of Unusual Talent.'

The art critic's fondness and respect for the artist is demonstrated by the lavish attention and poetic prose she used to open the article, which due to its beauty of description and stunning time-capsule effect is quoted in full, as follows:

“An Irvington studio, tucked away among the vines and shrubbery in the vicinity of Pleasant run, forms the workshop of an artist whose career has been one of serious study. Canvases large and canvases small bear evidence of the steps that have been taken, of the periods of change and development that have followed one another in logical order as advancement was made. From the time in girlhood days, with its usual dreams of books to be written, when there was a decision to take a few art lessons in order to make the decorative drawings that would illustrate the printed pages, until the present day, when big Indiana landscapes are being painted on little rectangular pieces of canvas, an art talent whose motive has been subjective, rather than objective, has been seeking to express the individuality of the artist while interpreting the beauty in nature. We are taught that all art is an attempt at self-expression. But we know that all art is not to the same degree stamped with the artist's individuality. 

It was one of those days when the thermometer was said to have registered 110 degrees on the street the middle of last week that I lifted unwilling feet over hot cement sidewalks a distance which, in usual weather, would have meant about a half mile walk, but which seemed immeasurable increased in the immense heat. A short stretch of cinder walk offered an alluring  turn from the glare of the pavement at Lowell avenue. A few steps brought me to number 6031, which marked the studio of Dorothy Morlan.  This two-roomed studio, in the yard, separate from the dwelling house, was built several years ago, but it so happened that this was my first visit to it.”

The article explains to the reader that despite Morlan's recent sparsity of exhibition in local shows, indeed it cites her decision to skip the upcoming Indiana Artists exhibition at Herron, she remained active and busy in her artistic creations, as attested by the many works, large and small, on the walls and in the corners of her studio. 

Her most recent 'period' of work are the smaller canvases along the line of Winter Evening discussed a year prior in The Star. The eight or ten such small pictures of the flat open fields surrounding Irvington, showcase Morlan's unique talent, as Lucille Morehouse describes, “...in the small pictures (Morlan's) representation of the big things in nature impresses with a feeling of vastness not always found in a landscape painting whose dimensions are several times larger.”

Morehouse contrasts the newer work with her earlier solo show some twelve or fourteen years prior, which included “...bright, joyous canvases painted at Hanover  – scenes along the Ohio River, interpretations of morning mists and the sparkle of sunlight on the water and the coming of springtime along wooded hillsides.”

Morehouse cites Dorothy Morlan as giving credit, in part, for her “strong feeling for the big things in nature” to the influence of the painters Edward W. Redfield and Walter Elmer Schofield, both of whom had works represented in the permanent collection of Herron Institute, and both of whom painted “big winter landscapes” with a “broad, vigorous brush.” 

Morehouse lauds Morlan for her determined, experimental approach despite the influence of those and other artists who she held in high esteem. “Be influenced, but do not imitate,” Morehouse proclaims, as a could-be Morlan mantra. 

Lucille Morehouse provides some final insider advise to her readers when she says about visiting an artist's studio as opposed to seeing the work hanging in a gallery or museum. “There is a sort of studio atmosphere, a feeling of intimacy and a charm of companionship with the artist that is wholly  lacking when one views the pictures of many artists in a large exhibition. Try it and see!”

Less Exhibits, More Honors – Morlan's 'December.'

Morlan's hiatus from exhibition continues over the next years. In late summer 1923, she is mentioned in Star coverage of the Indiana State Fair art exhibition, not as an exhibitor, but as one of the many no-shows. Perhaps at that period of time, the State Fair exhibit was just getting established as a serious venue for Indiana's best art and artists.

On January 5, 1924, on the front page of the 'photogravure' section of the Sunday Star, an interesting full-page pictorial, depicting an interesting pastiche of Indiana geography, culture, history and architecture, is presented in a piece tied together by its title, Four Corners of Indiana.

Photogravure was a popular etching and printing method at that time, which resulted in images with subtle gradations in tone and a rich velvety texture distinct from standard photographs of the period. 

Four Corners showed images of the farthest reaches of Indiana, northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast, along with two fine contemporary homes, a photo of the last surviving indigenous people of the Miami tribe, an aerial view of Wabash College and two Indiana artists, Dorothy Morlan and Otto Stark, on opposite sides of the page facing each other, standing at their easels. A map of the Indiana and "the heart of Hoosierdom," Monument Circle,  is shown at the center of the pictorial spread.

In her March 1, 1924 Star column, Lucille Morehouse covers the 17th Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron Institute. Her observations note the distinctions in the show from those of prior years, describing the work as generally smaller, the landscapes generally fewer – with more still lifes, portraits and figure pieces represented – and also an increase in craft works and sculpture.

For the column, Morehouse speaks generally of the landscape work, not noting the names of individual artists or titles, but her words on one picture seem to be  about a Dorothy Morlan picture. 

“Outstanding among the landscapes is a big snowy field,  with an evergreen or two, when early twilight turns the snow to violet-blue.”

Lucille Morehouse was likely describing the large Morlan canvas,  December,  that was exhibited in the Indiana Artists show, and a photo of which appeared on a pictorial page of The Indianapolis Star later that month on March 30.

The picture was an important one for Morlan, and Morehouse, as the critic again describes the piece when it appeared hanging in a prime spot, a “place of honor,”  in an October 1924 exhibit of five women artists at Pettis Gallery, on the fifth floor of the Pettis Dry Goods store in Indianapolis. 

Morehouse reports that the five woman had appeared, some together, some in groups or solo, at various earlier times in venues such as the Indiana Artists at Herron Institute, the Indiana Artists' Club and Woman's Department Club House.

Morehouse says about the five women generally, 

“There are neither insanities nor inanities in this exhibition of paintings...” and further, “ ...in both subject and treatment, the work would hold its own with a like number of pictures by a like number of men...”

In discussing the honored Morlan landscape, confirmed to be December later in her column, Morehouse writes, 

“The fact that the canvas measures 30x42 inches is not the only thing that makes it big. And the fact that the wide, snow-covered field stretches back and back, apparently for miles, is not the chief thing that makes the picture big. But it is the artist's interpretation of a big solemn mood that stamps the canvas as one of the most distinctive, to my way of thinking, that has been painted recently by any Indiana artist, man or woman.”

Morehouse continues, in part,

“There is a beauty in execution...There is a tenderness, a tranquility, moderating its austerity.”

The First Hoosier Salon, The Valley, and Deaths. 

In March 1925, the inaugural Hoosier Salon exhibit opened at the Marshall Field and Co. store in Chicago, Illinois. Dorothy Morlan was represented with a prize winning painting, A Frosty Morning,  which later traveled with other representative works and was displayed at the West Baden Springs Hotel in Indiana. 

Lucille Morehouse details the first Hoosier Salon, the mechanics of its inception and initial patronage, the prize winners and participants over two articles appearing in The Indianapolis Star on March 8 and March 15, 1925. She describes an unnamed Morlan canvas, presumably Frosty Morning, as “a big sober landscape.” The picture won the $50 Nolan prize. 

The Indianapolis Star was running a pictorial series in its paper 'Notable Paintings by Indiana Artists' in 1925. On September 20, No. XIV in the Series was The Valley by Dorothy Morlan. The reproduction image looks almost like a drawing rather than a painting, or perhaps a watercolor, as fine dark lines sketch in the curving flow of river and the roll of hills. There is an etched or hatched quality to the work, a sgraffito of paint marks such that, if oil was used, it appears paint was very sparingly applied, and perhaps in a subtractive manner removed with a palette knife.

Lucille Morehouse reports on the summer activity in the studio of Dorothy Morlan in an October 25, 1925, Star article.  She describes, 

“ (Morlan) defied the heat of summer as she sifted 'snow' to the canvas, working from sketches she had made last winter, but modifying them so that the completed picture will in no wise be a realistic view along Pleasant Run.”

The following year, on January 10, 1926, The Indianapolis Star posted a death notice for Dorothy Moran's father, age 75 years. 

Albert Morlan was husband to Martha, and father to Miss Dorothy, and  to sons Percy and Harold, all of Indianapolis, and to son Ralph of Nashville, Indiana. 

Albert Morlan died at home on Lowell Avenue in Irvington, and funeral services were private.

An August 1927 'In the World of Art' column by Lucille Morehouse, reports that Dorothy Morlan had spent the summer in California, after the death of her mother in April, to tend to an ailing aunt. Morlan's aunt succumbed to her illness and Morlan was set to return to Indiana that fall. She had suffered the death of father, then mother and finally aunt within a year and a half.

The 21st Indiana Artists exhibit at Herron is reviewed by Lucille Morehouse in the March 4, 1928 Indianapolis Star. She describes Morlan's painting Where the Blue Begins, which, from the sound of Morehouse's description,  may have been influenced by Morlan's many close personal losses over the prior months. Morehouse writes, 

“Dorothy Morlan displays the largest landscape canvas, a big sober composition of slow-sloping fields with patches of snow under sullen sky and with distant body of water.”

A Group of Her Own.

The inaugural Irvington Artists exhibit at the Carr Hall automobile salesroom on East Washington Street in Irvington took place from November through December 1928. The event was widely covered in the local press which reported over one thousand visitors to the exhibit. A half page pictorial spread was devoted to the Irvington Artists on November 25 in The Star. It included William Forsyth and daughter Constance Forsyth, Helene Hibben and Thomas Hibben, Frederick Polley, Clifton Wheeler and Dorothy Morlan. 

Simon P. Baus, Robert Craig and Hilah Wheeler were not included in the pictorial, but did exhibit in the show. 

Clifton Wheeler, Hilah Wheeler and Simon P. Baus were all reported to have sold work during the exhibition's run.    

Dorothy Morlan was represented by at least two works, including Ohio River Valley and Valley in Winter.

The Irvington Artists exhibit, sponsored by the Irvington Union of Clubs, was noted in Lucille Morehouse's 1928 'year in review' column that was printed in the January 2, 1929 Indianapolis Star.

And with that, another decade in the career of Dorothy Morlan comes to a close.

Later that fateful year, 1929, a stock market crash would wreak havoc on the economies of the world. The 1930s would bring the Great Depression and worse. The perseverance of Dorothy Morlan and her fellow artists through those turbulent years will follow in Part Four.

Mark Diekhoff,  August 2025

Dorothy Morlan – Indiana's First Modernist Painter, Part 1

Her Place in Time.

A trailblazing painter came of artistic age at the turn of a century, 125 years ago in Central Indiana. In the 1900s, the 1910s and into the Roaring Twenties and beyond, Dorothy Morlan tirelessly pursued a unique and evolving inspiration and nurtured a personal artistic vision that set her apart and ahead of even the most talented artists in Indiana during those times. Her paintings were expressionist, by both design and color, simultaneous with the formation of that 'official' artistic movement half the world away in Berlin and Paris. 

To place Dorothy Morlan in time, arguably the world's most famous and first modernist, Pablo Picasso, was almost an exact contemporary. He was born in 1881 and she in 1882.  Two American mavericks that also shared the year, plus or minus, of Morlan's birth are Arthur Dove and Rockwell Kent. The works of all these rogue and wandering personalities were expressive distillates of experimentation, innovation and ambition.  Their artworks were evocations of their individual psychologies made accessible and more generally relatable by some strange alchemic process of refined sensorial emphasis. In Morlan's specific case,  the visual simplification and enhanced colorization of something experiential and personal and overwhelming.   

These contemporaries were born at the tail end of the Civil War in America, and in the Europe, the Franco-Prussian War. Children of  battle scarred parents, coming of age  just before the Lost Generation would coalesce. They shared a momentous world unfolding with shocking events.  Buffeted by a series of cultural eruptions that affected society at large, yet burnished in an individual way by their own localized milieus of routine and  adventure, culture and life. 

Even if a world or a continent apart,  these artists shared a hectic and harrowing timeline, with careers beginning with the dawn of the 20th Century and its mechanized metamorphosis. Careers that would grow and be molded amid a sustained barrage of cataclysmic events, political chaos and revolutionary change. The death of empires, the globe's maps redrawn. In American, women's suffrage and an experiment in  Prohibition.  Then a planetary stock market crash, the birth of a cascading totalitarianism and great wars, over and over again. 

In the case of Picasso and Morlan, they both had painter fathers who introduced them to a creative world at an early age and were prodigies as a result. They each were equipped to perceive their times with a trained talent from the get-go. Quickly eclipsing their fathers and moving beyond their elders, and would push the limits of local traditions and forge a path forward and modern, into an age when tradition and boundary would cease to be. Picasso, the modernist in Europe, in Paris, the world's art capital, was among many fellow travelers. Dorothy Morlan, arguable the first modernist in Indianapolis, seemingly by herself.

Dorothy Morlan's Midwest and America was dominated by men. The Hoosier Group of painters, all men, reigned supreme in Indiana at the time. Their works were impressionist and naturalist and inspired by the European art of the mid to late 1800s, the 'in vogue' art of their youthful training. Dorothy Morlan's early study at her father's side, and then more formally, by two of these same Hoosier Group of men, seemed to combine the tried and true impressionist approach to the natural landscape as a foundation for her open and searching soul.  

Pioneering American women changed society as Morlan was to do with her art and her community. Simpatico, by all record, with the truly American notions of modernism, in the age of Henry Ford –  new ways to see, new was to express, new ways to be.

Inception of her modernist inclination.

Born in Salem, Ohio in 1882, Dorothy Morlan's family moved to Indiana in 1894 and settled eventually into a home in the 6000 block of Lowell Avenue in Irvington. 

In a biographical statement provided to Indianapolis Star art writer, Lucille Morehouse, in 1933, Miss Morlan indicates she aspired to paint pictures to follow in the footsteps of her father, an amateur artist, who had an art for art's sake love of  outdoor painting. She also credits her mother's artistic sensibilities of color and design as instrumental in her development. 

The artist's first landscape experiments were paintings on site of the fields of Irvington, among its beech trees and woodlands and aside Pleasant Run Creek. 

Her love of landscape would remain her artistic obsession throughout her career. It was an adoration within her from the start. The first public inklings of this devotion can be observed in newsprint rather than paint. In a remarkable written piece on the front page of Section 2 of the Sunday Indianapolis Journal dated  March 9, 1902,  Dorothy Morlan expresses poetically about 'The Last Day of February.' 

Her first published lines read,

“The morning has been dark. The sky lowering, with great cloud billows rolling onward like the waves of a restless sea.”

She continues to describe the transformation of the morning, as a  microcosm of the turn from winter to spring,

“...the wind grew less angry and a clear patch of blue appeared in the sky bound by folds of the purest white. In less than an hour the mighty wind was converted into a gentle south breeze and the clouds had all vanished except a few, white and rosy-tinted, which sailed like peaceful barks through a sky as clear and calm as a summer sea.”

For her readers, the minds' eyes are drawn from sky to earth, as Dorothy Morlan continues her painterly words,

“The meadows are rich with tones of brown. There stretches away in dim perspective a soft gray 

line of woods, which gradually becomes more faint until it almost merges into the horizon. Nearer, in a little grove, stand several rugged beeches, like sentinels, clad in last year's foliage.” 

At twenty years old, Dorothy Morlan was already a sensitive seer. And a published one at that! 

An art career was encouraged by both parents and she would ultimately receive training at John Herron Art School, c. 1906, instructed, most notably, by two Hoosier Group artists, as noted prior. 

Several autumns around this time were spent in Brookville, Indiana, known for its scenic river views, painting in vicinity of  J. Ottis Adams and his Hermitage retreat. Her crucial Herron painting teacher was William Forsyth, also her Irvington neighbor.  

Morlan would credit both Adams and Forsyth for the vital instruction and criticism they provided during her formative years.

She would further her art education with later instruction at The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art at Philadelphia, and under famed artist Robert Henri in New York City. 

Active Progression – Dorothy Morlan in the 1900s.

It is said that Vincent van Gogh sold but one painting during his life. His 'Red Vineyard,' in a Brussels Belgium exhibit in 1890, toward the end of his life, was sold to artist/collector Anna Boch. It was the only documented sale of his work while he lived.

The Dorothy Morlan paper trail of sales and notoriety begins at the beginning of her career. In an early mention of her as an artist, just out of school,  J. W. Fox (the Herron Institute of Art Director) in the The Indianapolis News reports in his June 9, 1906 article on 'Three Important Art Exhibits of Summer.' He writes that Dorothy Morlan, among others, sold a landscape painting in the annual Herron exhibit. He went on to describe the the overall success of the school that year and the upcoming expansion into a new Herron classroom building for the fall. The name or the price of Morlan's artwork was not reported.

In an October, 15, 1906  society column in The Indianapolis News, it is noted that Dorothy Morlan will be spending several weeks in October and November in Brookville, Indiana, sketching and painting its environs. The same column, the following spring, advised on April 26, 1907, that Morlan would be spending two weeks in Plainfield, Indiana, sketching along White Lick Creek.

Opening June 11, 1907 in Richmond, Indiana, was an annual exhibit sponsored by the Richmond Art Association. Dorothy Morlan was one of many artists to participate and compete for prizes with her painting Bit of Whitewater Valley possibly painted the prior fall in Brookville.

The first art criticism of Dorothy Morlan's work is by, again, W. H. Fox in The Indianapolis News. On June 6, 1907, he comments on her landscape work exhibited at the most recent Herron exhibit, and also at shows in Vincennes, Indiana and Richmond. Presumable he is speaking of Bit of Whitewater Valley and another unnamed work when he says her paintings are “strongly individual compositions to which an excellent color sense is manifest.”

An anonymous art review in the June 21, 1907 edition of The Vincennes Commercial notes two Dorothy Morlan submissions, October and Summer in a first ever annual exhibit in that town. Saying October is  “...a painting that is felt and well drawn. The sky is a little cold and should be more sympathetic, but it has a lot of good atmosphere.” 

The annual Indiana Artists exhibit was held at Herron, in the new classroom building, and Dorothy Morlan had a painting included called The Willows  according to a December 1907 Indianapolis Star article. 

In a January 25, 1908, Indianapolis News anonymous article on the society page, Morlan's continuing success as an artist is reported in detail. 'Irvington Woman Wins Honor as an Artist' reports that Dorothy Morlan's aforementioned canvas The Willows had been accepted for inclusion in the 103rd Annual Exhibit of American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, at Philadelphia. The painting is described in detail by the unnamed writer. “It is marked by its composition and breadth of treatment. It was painted directly, and shows the spontaneity and charm of work thus produced. No doubt the style brought it favor in the eyes of the Philadelphia jury, as much of the work of leading artists  in the East is being done in this manner.” 

The writer goes on the explain Morlan's apparent method of finishing a work on site, and in one go, with no successive finishing sessions or retouching of the work. 

“The result is strength and vigor such as is striven for by the impressionist, yet obtained by an entirely different method.”  

According to the writer, Morlan's work is exclusively landscapes in oil, unusual for a woman at the time. 

In a February 8, 1908 review of the 12th Annual Society of Western Artists exhibit, in The Indianapolis News, W. H Fox once again writes about Dorothy Morlan, “...Sunny Morning in November deepens the impression made by her admirable Willows...” 

Fox adds about her technique, “...with a good color sense, original in composition, strong and free in her brush work, there is more than promise in this young artist.”   

Fox continues his words of admiration for Morlan, in a spirit of pride and boosterism befitting the director of the local art institute. He notes her rapid rise and heralds her 'arrival' on the local scene.

In what may have been a traveling exhibit of works by the Society of Western Artists members, Morlan showed her landscape painting A By Way – Brookville at the Brazil, Indiana High School Building in mid-February, 1908. Other artists included Hoosier Group artists T. C. Steele, Otto Stark, J.O. Adams, R. B. Gruelle and fellow female Emma King to name a few. 

Around this same time, the same Miss Emma King, artist, held a tea in her studio in downtown Indianapolis on East Market Street in honor of Dorothy Morlan. In the studio, bedecked with the paintings by Morlan and decorated with vases of daffodils, many guests, including Mrs. Ottis Adams, were in attendance.

A hyperactive and exuberant Indianapolis art scene can be imagined as reported in a March 1, 1908 Indianapolis Star article 'Society of Fakers Stirs Art Circles.' The column chronicles the burlesque exhibition of mad cap art students calling themselves The Western Society of Fakers.  In the show, Herron students mocked, pilloried and/or trolled their artistic elders by creating a wild variety of slapdash, slapstick visual artwork jokes.  Just to name a few outlandish examples from the very detailed article that mentions an exhaustive list, young Simon P. Baus, (and later Irvington Group member) created Winter Morning by J. Otiss Adams, 'a bunch of cotton pasted on a landscape.'  Cobb Shinn created  Sunny Brook by William Forsyth, showing a muddy pool with frogs and snakes. 

The fact of Morlan's 'arrival' as announced previously by W. H Fox  is further confirmed by the fact that her painting style was already a known commodity, like her well-established Hoosier Group forebears, and subject to the fakery of Sunday Morning in November by student Robert Collins.

The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram reported on June 10, 1908 that Dorothy Morlan's painting Winter Wheat won an Honorable Mention prize in the 4th Annual Exhibit of the Richmond Art Association. 

In the July 4, 1908, edition of The Indianapolis News, Dorothy Morlan is discussed at length in an article with the lengthy headline 'Group of Young Artists Has Sprung Up Recently Whose Work Succeeds Along Individual Lines.' The column by Ruth Braden, reports that Morlan is one of few women who paint the landscape in oil, seconding an earlier observation about Morlan by a different writer. 

Braden writes that the wide out-of-doors is Morlan's preferred studio, year round, and that Morlan has had particular success in capturing winter moods on her canvases.  

About painting the natural scene close to home, Braden quotes Morlan, “The sky is always here – and always changing.”

In February 1909, an exhibit of paintings by Indiana artists was shown in the Columbus, Indiana Public Library. Dorothy Morlan submitted four works; 1. Spring, 2. Summer Sky, 3. The Hill and the Cloud, 4.  A Summer Landscape. Her prices ranged from  $35 to $50 and placed her asking price at about one-quarter to one-third of the going rate for works by the Hoosier Group artists also showing.  

Traveling exhibits of Morlan's work was reported in newspapers in Evansville, Lafayette and Muncie in the spring of 1909. 

Dorothy Morlan's first one-person show was anonymously announced and detailed in The Indianapolis News on November 9, 1909. The exhibit as described in the column “Work of Dorothy Morlan”  included twenty-two paintings, created over the prior two years, and was being shown at  the art gallery of B. H. Herman and Co. on North Pennsylvania Street in Indianapolis. 

Two paintings, Autumn Willows (aka The Willows) and The Ohio River in December had been recently exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, at Philadelphia. Four scenes of the Irvington area were captured in The Melting Snow, The Edge of the Village, The Winter Field and The Hill Road.

There was also a north-looking sketch of the canal at Thirteenth Street, in Indianapolis.

Two paintings created near Hanover, Indiana, were The  Valley and Across the Valley. 

Further paintings included were of Kentucky hills as seen from the Indiana shore of the Ohio River, winter fields, sky studies, and a not-to-be-missed canvas, A Hazy Afternoon in June.

The same show is reviewed in The Indianapolis Star by Roderick S. Munford in the Art and Artists column on November 18, 1909. He says of Morlan's work, generally, “...there is scarcely a picture of them all that is not done in a different manner that that of its fellows.” The overall impression from studying  her paintings “...all represent an intimate communion with nature.”

About the several Irvington scenes and mainly the more numerous studies of Southern Indiana along the Ohio River “with much sky and water in evidence”, Munford says, “Originality is a characteristic in the artist's method of handling.”  

The writer provides so much care and detail in his description of specific paintings in Morlan's show, that he will quoted at length as follows:

Melting Snow has been done with a sure hand, the patches of white over earth and the broken surface of a road being the chief points of interest in an interesting picture. The same bit of road appears again in The Hill Road. The latter is not as admirably balanced a piece of composition as the former, but it makes up by its charm of color, which is in harmony from the high sky line down to the foreground edge.

Indiana Fields and Sky Study are filled with air and sunlight and flying clouds and breathe throughout of the out-of-doors. These are only a few of Miss Morlan's pictures. Some are full of high color, some are lower in key; all are thoughtful and display the student as well as the artist.

And with that, the first decade of the 20th Century comes to a close. 

The New York Armory Show is still several years away. The modern art of Europe has not yet landed on American shores, but for Dorothy Morlan and the most adventurous of her artistic generation, the modern art moment had arrived.

Mark Diekhoff,  July 2025

Upcoming –  Part Two – Dorothy Morlan; Jazz Age Gem and the Turbulent Years