Theodore Clement Steele

Pleasant Run, 1885

oil on canvas

19 ¼ x 32 ¼ inches

Gift of Carl B. Shafer

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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.

Pleasant Run has been called the masterpiece of Steele’s Munich manner.  It was painted within months of the artist’s return from five years of study in Germany, where he became increasingly devoted to painting from nature.  The canvas’ dark tonalities, backlighting, and even its composition, relate to Steele’s scenes of Bavaria.  Yet as the artist noted in his journal, he remained sensitive to the nuances of the Indiana landscape, carefully recording its color contrasts and clear light.  In 1885 when T. C. Steele painted this landscape, Pleasant run defined the eastern and southern limits of Indianapolis.  The area depicted here was located just north of Irvington at the southwest corner of what is now Arlington and Tenth Street.

Reference

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