Theodore Clement Steele

Munich Girl, 1884

oil on canvas

20 x 16 1/8 inches

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alpheus H. Snow in memory of Mr. and Mrs. John M. Butler

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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 young woman in Steele’s canvas represents a departure from the Royal Academy’s preference for older models.  This attractive figure, whose youthful facial features emerge from the dark shadows, is rendered in brown tonalities against an unadorned, dark background.  The setting and execution exemplify the austere style espoused by Germany’s Royal Academy teachers.  Löfftz was prone to severe criticism of the “sweet color” in his students’ work and praised such somber and meditative images as Munich Girl.

Reference

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