"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show returns to the American heartland to continue our study of Impressionist landscape painters in the Public Domain with the second of three 10-piece Exhibitions of works by Theodore Clement Steele (1847-1926), born near Gosport Owen County, Indiana, the oldest child of a saddle-maker and farmer.

 

Steele developed an interest in art and drawing early in life and began his formal training as a boy at the Waveland Collegiate Institute (Waveland Academy). At sixteen he attended art classes at Asbury College (now DePauw University) in Greencastle, Indiana.

After further studies in Chicago and Cincinnati, he returned home to Indiana to paint portraits on commission.

 

Steele married and in 1870, and soon had a son and daughter. After moving to Indianapolis he managed to support his family by painting commissioned portraits and commercial signs.

 

When Steele wished to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, his friend and art patron, Herman Lieber, provided financial support which made it possible. In 1880 Steele and his family traveled to Europe with fellow Hoosiers J. Ottis Adams, Carrie Wolf, August Metzner, and Samuel Richards, joined two years later by Hoosier artist William Forsyth.

 

Steele studied at the Royal Academy under artists Gyula Benczúr and Ludwig Löfftz, spending hours studying paintings of the Old Masters found in Munich galleries. He also began developing his plein air style of painting. 

 

In 1885, Steele and family returned to the Tinker property in Indianapolis, where his studio became a local landmark and center of the local arts community. He painted landscapes during the warm weather months and returned to his studio to paint portraits in the winter, still his chief source of income.

 

In 1900 he received an Honorary Master of Arts degree from Wabash College and helped establish a museum and art school in the Tinker mansion, Steele’s home in Indianapolis. Steele’s art studio became the first Herron School of Art.

 

A renowned portrait painter, Steele was commissionsed to paint the official portraits of several Indiana governors, the poet James Whitcomb Riley and President Benjamin Harrison.

 

Steele remarried and built a hilltop studio-home on sixty acres near Belmont, an isolated area of Brown County, Indiana, which they named the House of the Singing Winds. Today the property is called the T. C. Steele State Historic Site and is open to the public.

 

In 1922 Steele accepted an appointment as IU’s first artist-in-residence. He died at home in Brown County on July 24, 1926.

 

Today, T.C. Steele is considered one of the most-important painters in Indiana history, his works widely collected and displayed by both individuals and museums, which include the Indiana State Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Indiana University Art Museum in Bloomington, Indiana. Steele was conferred honorary degrees from Wabash College in 1900 and Indiana University in 1916.