"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of American landscape painters in the Public Domain with a multiple-part Exhibition of works by William J. Forsyth (1854–1935),  an Impressionist painter who was part of the "Hoosier Group" of Indiana artists.

 

Forsyth was born in California, Ohio, a small town along the Ohio River, not far from Cincinnati. At the age of fifteen, he studied art with Barton S. Hays, who, along with Jacob Cox, was one of the city's leading artists and a teacher of William Merritt Chase and John Washington Love.

 

Forsyth was the first student of Love’s  Indiana School of Art in Indianapolis, where he enrolled in 1877. He entered the Royal Academy in Munich along with T. C. Steele and John Ottis Adams in 1882. Forsyth completed his studies in 1886 but stayed in Europe another two years, sharing Adam's studio.

 

After returning to Indiana in 1888, he assisted Adams at an art school in Fort Wayne.

He was a key founder of the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis in 1888. Forsyth and Adams opened their own school in Muncie in the fall of 1889. Forsyth left after the spring term of 1891 and moved back to  Indianapolis, where he became a principal instructor in T.C. Steele’s Indiana School of Art. After Steele resigned in 1895, Forsyth taught day and evening classes until June 1897.

 

He joined the faculty of the Herron School of Art in 1906 replacing his friend J. Ottis Adams as the principal instructor of drawing and painting. He would teach there until 1933. He died March 29, 1935 and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana.

 

Forsyth, in his 1916 essay entitled "Art in Indiana," written for the state's centennial, was perhaps the best spokesman for this Hoosier group of artists and the following could easily serve as his epitaph:

 

"To live out-of-doors in intimate touch with nature, to feel the sun, to watch the ever changing face of the landscape, where waters run and winds blow and trees wave and clouds move, and to walk with all the hours of the day and into the mysteries of night through all the seasons of the year---this is the heaven of the Hoosier Painter!"