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Perspectives from The Artist's Road

An Indiana Road 1888 T. C. Steele (PD)

At the turn of the century, Indiana poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote: “Speaking o’ art, I know a feller over t’ Terry Haute ‘kin spit clean over a box car.” His tongue-in-cheek comment expressed his view that in the 1880s, Indiana was not a cultural Mecca. It is hard for us to imagine today how difficult it must have been to pursue the fine arts in what was considered to be a backwater, much less to work in the radical new style of Impressionism. However, a highly skilled and very talented group of painters chose to return from their European academy educations to their home state of Indiana to practice their art and to teach.

These young men could have chosen to live in the larger metropolitan art centers of the United States, where they would most likely have found a more receptive market and audience for their work. Four of the group of five accomplished artists, T. C. Steele, William Forsyth, Otto Stark and J. Ott…