On the Road: Brown County, Indiana and Hoosier Artist T.C. Steele

I haven’t written a travel blogpost for a while, so as I lean into retirement and “next steps” in the coming year, I have a yearning for more travel and more opportunities to write about it. Although not always as specifically “spiritual or faith-filled” as many of my posts, I hope you will enjoy our occasional meanderings around America’s Midwest and elsewhere to discover beautiful, historical places and the interesting and creative people who live (or have lived) in them. For it is in this beauty and creativity that I so often find God…

Last weekend, Sue and I took off for one of our long weekend trips in search of history, art, natural beauty and adventure. After a bit of wandering along I-70 in southern Illinois (including a pit stop to see the world’s largest rocking chair, mailbox, pitchfork, pencil and windchime in Casey, Illinois), and a quick sojourn to Indianapolis to see one of my photos on display in the Inspired By Spring exhibit at the historic Lilly House at Newfields, we made our way to Bloomington and eventually on Sunday to Brown County, Indiana, home to the early 20^th-century “Hoosier Artists” and, most notably, impressionist painter T.C. Steele, the godfather of the movement.

Did we know of Steele and the Hoosier artists as we planned our trip to Brown County? We did not. This is why we love to travel. We head in a given direction, we know where we’re going to stay and have picked out a few places we want to visit, but we allow ourselves to be surprised by what the road and journey gives us. This trip gave us T.C. Steele.

The T.C. Steele Historic Site was en route to our given destination of Nashville, Indiana, known for its many art studios, galleries and kitschy shops, and we made our way there along scenic Indiana State Route 46.  Prompted by a website of things to do in Brown County, we veered off the highway and made our way up a hill to the historic site and home to Hoosier impressionist painter Theodore Clement Steele (1847-1926), who moved to the area in 1907 and became the first major artist to set up a studio in Brown County. The surrounding landscape and Steele’s growing fame drew other artists to the area and helped establish the Art Colony of the Midwest.

We were the only ones there when we arrived, so we received a relaxed, unhurried, personal tour with an expert guide who showed us Steele’s “Large Studio” with enormous north-facing windows, and his “House of the Singing Winds,” so named because of the whistling sound the wind made as it blew through the porch screens. Although Steele’s paintings hang in many museums, public buildings and private homes, more than 50 are on display in the studio and home for visitors to see. He was a gifted portrait painter and made much of his living in that art, but his deep love was nature and landscapes, which is what drew him (a widower) and his second wife, Selma, to the region. Through his landscapes one can easily see what southern Indiana looked like more than a century ago.

The site is 210 acres, which includes the buildings, five walking trails, a formal garden created by Selma as inspiration for her husband, and an old log cabin moved to the site in later years to capture and preserve a historic building of the era and region.

At the small gift shop I purchased a short but well-written and illustrated biography of Steele, “Paint and Canvas: The Life of T.C. Steele,” written by art historian Rachel Berenson Perry. In highly enjoyable, non-academic prose, the author chronicles Steele’s upbringing and early life in Indiana, his sojourn to Munich to perfect his art (under the sponsorship of a number of Indianapolis businessmen, the formation of the Hoosier group and his move to Brown County, and his later life when he split his time between his studio in Brown County and a position as an artist-in-residence at Indiana University, where art students literally came to peer over his shoulder as he worked.

In the 1920s, Perry writes, IU Professor of English F.C. Senour wrote a series of articles in the Indiana Daily Student, encouraging students to visit the artist in his campus studio. He wrote, “I want you to go to the studio that you may see Mr. Steele, and catch his joy — a quiet unobtrusive joy it is — in the artist life….His art is his life, and he, as you meet and talk to him, is the best commentary upon his pictures…His pictures are all interpretations of quiet beauty. If the world we each live in were the world he paints, we would have more joy and peace and rightness.” (Perry, 129)

I was delighted to read of Steele’s several visits to St. Louis, including exhibiting at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition and serving as a juror to select and give prizes to other artists at the Fair, as well as exhibiting in the 1910 meeting of the Society of Western Artists and  meeting Professor and Dean Marshall Snow of Washington University (where I work) in 1911.

I left with far too few photos of the studio and house, entranced as I was by the story of his life, his paintings, and the beauty of the gardens and his surroundings. But we left with a greater appreciation for one artist and one important movement in the history of American art, and that’s more that you can usually expect from a drive in the country.

A few more photos below: