Anticipating the adventures that lay ahead for the couple,
the young bride, whose brother had regaled her with tales about the area’s
“primitiveness and picturesqueness,” told her future husband that living on the
hilltop “could be made very simple, living so far away from everything—just
among the trees and clouds.”
Theodore Clement Steele, famed member along with William
Forsyth, Otto Stark, Richard Gruelle, and J. Ottis Adams of the Hoosier Group
of American regional impressionist painters, and, Selma Neubacher, the artist’s
second wife, went on to purchase two hundred and eleven acres near Belmont in
the Brown County hills. There they built their home, dubbed The House of the Singing Winds for the aural treats produced as the wind blew through the wire
of the screened porches surrounding the house.
The couple, married on August 9, 1907, later added a large
studio to accommodate Steele’s work, landscaped the surrounding hillsides, and
created several acres of gardens encompassing the home. “We felt and believed,”
said Selma Steele, “that here in this hill country were evidences of character
in the outdoors that would command of us our best and finest spirit.”
Honored during his career by election to the National
Academy of Design and service as president of the Society of Western Artists,
T. C. Steele was born in Owen County, Indiana, on September 11, 1847, the first
child of Samuel and Harriett Steele. As a youngster, Steele lived near
Waveland, a village he described as “a community of more than ordinary
intelligence and situated in a charming and pleasant country of prosperous
farms.”
Educated at the Waveland Collegiate Institute, Steele, from
an early age, displayed an aptitude for drawing. By the age of thirteen he was
teaching drawing at the institute and, five years later, he was listed in the
catalog for the school as the teacher of Drawing and Painting in the
preparatory department. Graduating in 1868, Steele went on to study painting
for a brief time in Chicago and Cincinnati. In 1870 he married Mary Elizabeth
“Libbie” Lakin, who had been a fellow student of his at the Institute. Drawn by
the promises of some painting commissions, the young couple lived in Battle
Creek, Michigan, for a time before returning to Indiana in 1873, settling in
Indianapolis.
For Steele, as he confessed to his journal, the two great
qualities an artist had to possess to “pass the point of mediocrity” were
mechanical skill matched with a “deep love of the beautiful.” Struggling to
live up to these qualities and make a living as an artist, Steele, through his
work as a portrait painter, drew the attention and patronage of Indianapolis
businessman Herman Lieber, who often exhibited the young painter’s work in his
store, the H. Lieber and Company Art Emporium.
Developing a reputation for his portrait work, Steele also
won the attention of the local press. A reporter from the Indianapolis Saturday Herald described Steele as a “tall
romantic-looking fellow” and as “an ideal artist in personal appearance,
wearing his hair and whiskers long, after the manner of Bohemians generally.”
Steele, who in 1877 had joined with John Love to form the Indianapolis Art
Association, left America in 1880 to study at the Royal Academy of Art in
Munich, Germany, a trip sponsored by Lieber in association with other Indianapolis
businessmen.
Upon his return to Indianapolis in 1885, Steele continued to
earn his living as an artist, receiving commissions for portraits and also
teaching art; for a time he worked with fellow Hoosier artist Forsyth at the
Indiana School of Art. Winning recognition as part of the Hoosier Group through
an 1894 exhibition in Chicago, Steele, a year later, stopped teaching in order
to devote more time to his work. Drawn more and more to landscape painting, he
joined with Adams to purchase the Hermitage in Brookville. Writing to his
daughter about the area, he said that the “haze makes this country seem like
some enchanted land, and as we ride about I feel more as if I were listening to
some beautiful story and that my fancy was picturing it—that it was not real at
all.” Shortly after receiving the honor of appointment to a commission to
select which American paintings were to be included in the Paris Universal
Exposition, Steele suffered the loss of his wife, Libbie, who died on November
14, 1899.
Steele’s move to Brown County, and his marriage to Selma,
began a new phase in his life and work. Writing to his fiancée as he supervised
construction of their new home in the hills in May 1907, Steele cautioned her
not to expect too much from the property at the beginning of their life
together. “Houses may be bought,” he wrote, “but homes grow and out of the
heart’s depths. Memories cluster about them, so that when we give them up,
there is a pain that will not go down. Rest and contentment and recreation live
in the home, and out of it we get the inspiration and strength for the work in
the world that tells. I look forward to this home for both of us, as a source
of inspiration.”
The location proved to be a boon for Steele’s painting.
Shortly after the newly married couple moved into their home, they settled on a
routine. The morning was used for individual work—Selma painted, too—and the
afternoon for tramping around the countryside. “Before many days,” she noted,
“even this plan was broken—for the painter was overwhelmed by the number of
paintable subjects to be done. Soon there were enough canvases started to cover
the hours of almost the entire day.”
The day started early for the artist, as he believed that
during “a work season” no landscape painter should be in bed after four o’clock
in the morning, his wife said. After an early lunch, Steele would rest for a
short time, usually by reading, listening to music, or walking with his wife.
Back to work in the afternoon and early evening, Steele often tramped far into
the woods in order to capture the right subject. “I marveled at his capacity
for work,” Selma said of her husband, adding that she came to realize that he
possessed a rare gift. “It was like an inner flame that kept his whole
being—mind, body, and soul—ever alive to the shifting scenes around him,” she
observed.
From 1907 to 1921 the Steeles spent the spring season at
their Brown County property and wintered in Indianapolis. In 1922, when Steele
became artist in residence and an honorary professor at Indiana University, the
couple established a home in Bloomington.
While working on a painting of a peony arrangement at his
Brown County home in May 1926, Steele fell seriously ill. After a trip to a
clinic in Terre Haute failed to offer any relief, the Steeles returned to their
home on the hill on the Fourth of July. The painter died at eight o’clock in
the evening on July 24, 1926. For comfort, Selma Steele recalled something her
husband had once said to her during a time of sorrow: “Don’t you know there are
some things one cannot reason out?”
No comments:
Post a Comment