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The luminosity and color harmonies in this painting exemplify Steele's impressionist style.

The title refers to the white, gauzy veil that covers grapes at harvest time.

Painted at Vernon, Indiana, The Bloom of the Grape is Steele's best-known landscape.

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Theodore Clement Steele

The Bloom of the Grape, 1893

oil on canvas

30 1/8 x 40 1/8 inches

Bequest of Delavan Smith

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T. C. Steele was born in Gosport Indiana.  His family later moved to Waveland where Steele began taking art classes at age twelve.  By the time he was eighteen, Steele was teaching drawing and painting at Waveland Collegiate Institute. Steele moved to Indianapolis and cultivated a friendship with Herman Lieber, who became his patron.  He studied at the Indiana School of Art with its founder John Love.  Lieber raised the funds to send Steele and his family to Europe. Steele chose to go to Munich because it was less expensive than Paris and he could study with Frank Duveneck, a prominent Ohio painter.  When Steele returned to Indianapolis, he established an art school with William Forsyth.  He did portraits and landscapes, many of them dark and dramatic, in the style known as the Munich School.  When he began to explore the Indiana countryside, Steele turned almost completely to landscape painting, and his work became more colorful and gradually more impressionistic.  Steele emerged as the leader and spokesman for a group of Indiana artists known as The Hoosier Group, which included Indiana’s most important Impressionist painters, including William Forsyth, J. Ottis Adams, Otto Stark, and Richard Gruelle.  In 1902 and 1903, Steele toured the American West, painting in Oregon and around San Francisco.  In 1906, he settled in Brown County in a home that became known as the House of the Singing Winds.

The Bloom of the Grape, painted in Vernon, Indiana, in early November 1893 during what Steele called “a glorious autumn,” is the artist’s best-known landscape.  Its title refers to the white gauzy veil, known as “bloom,” covering grapes at harvest time.  Steele wrote to his wife that he had never seen better color, “such dull reads and crimsons and faded yellows and oranges, in juxtaposition with such royal purples.” These rich color harmonies are captured in this painting in a manner that critic Charles F. Browne described as conservatively impressionistic, but not wild.  The luminosity and color harmonies found in Bloom of the Grape exemplify the new approach to landscape painting that would earn Steele national recognition for his modified Impressionist style.

Reference

William H. Gerdts.  Theodore Clement Steele: American Master of Light, New York: Chameleon Books, 1995. ASIN: B002J7NK4K