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

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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