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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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