Theodore Clement Steele

Theodore Clement Steele took Impressionism to Indiana and made it fit. He trained in Munich, which normally produced dark tonal painting, then abandoned that palette almost entirely once back in the Midwest, working outdoors in higher key colour.

He was the central figure of the Hoosier Group, five painters who argued that Indiana landscape deserved serious attention rather than being a stop on the way to somewhere else. The ravines, creeks and hillsides around Brown County gave him most of his subjects after 1907.

He built a house and studio there, the House of the Singing Winds, and painted the surrounding country in every season for the rest of his life. Later years brought a state university appointment as artist in residence, an unusual post at the time.