Currier wasted no time with under-painting, and never prettied up his large canvases after returning to his studio. Though Steele struggled to loosen up his logical compositions, the challenges of plein air painting had him hooked.Īfter he returned to Indianapolis in 1885, Steele pursued his landscape painting seasonally, stealing time from his grueling portrait-painting schedule. Considered a relief from the rigors of winter figure study classes, groups of American students flocked to the moorlands to paint in the company of dynamic ex-patriot, J.
Steele first became excited about painting on location while living in Schleissheim and attending the Royal Academy from 1880-1885.
Despite Steele’s credentials, including a student silver medal at Munich’s Royal Academy of Art Honorable Mention in the 1900 Paris Exposition winner of coveted Fine Arts Building Prize at the 14th Society of Western Artists’ annual exhibition in 1909 and election to associate membership in New York’s National Academy of Design, sales of his paintings, as well as name recognition, remained regional. Choosing to live and work far away from the eastern seaboard, their names were virtually unknown, even when their paintings were juried into the annual exhibits at the National Academy of Design and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Indiana artists were at a disadvantage for national recognition in the late 1800s. He was an accomplished and sought-after portrait artist and, by the time of his death, he’d painted many of Indiana’s most prominent citizens. Steele’s day, a market had yet to be developed for landscape painting in Indiana, and he earned his bread and butter painting commissioned portraits. The continuing annual juried exhibitions, the Hoosier Salon (established in 1926) and Indiana Heritage Arts (started in the late 1970s) typically display a majority of landscapes, painted on location or in studios, of Indiana’s surprisingly diverse scenery.īut in T. Ottis Adams (1851-1927), set a precedent for plein air painters of today, many of whom paint in a similar impressionistic style the subjects and seasons that interested their predecessors.
Steele’s devotion to landscape painting, along with Hoosier Group artists William Forsyth (1854-1935) and J.
The artists are posed as if they were choosing paintings for an art exhibition. Richard Gruelle had died seven years earlier. This ambitious portrait presents the members of the Hoosier group, (from left to right) T.
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