A leading figure in Midwestern art, Theodore Clement Steele was the dean of Indiana artists at the turn of the century. His family moved in 1852 to Waveland, Indiana, where he grew up. Virtually self-taught, he was earning his living as a portrait painter by 1870. In 1873 Steele moved to Indianapolis. In 1880 patrons sponsored his studies at the Royal Academy of the Fine Arts in Munich, where he took a class in life drawing and studied painting with Ludwig von Löfftz (1845-1910), winning the academy’s silver medal in 1884.

He also studied landscape painting with the American expatriate J. Frank Currier (1843-1909). In 1885 Steele returned to Indianapolis, where he worked increasingly as a landscape painter. By 1893, at the time of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he had emerged as a practitioner of and spokesman for American impressionism, writing an article entitled "Impressionalism," which appeared in the avant-garde journal Modern Art (1 [Winter 1893]: unpaginated). In 1907 he built his House of the Singing Winds in Brown County, an area he discovered to be good for painting and which attracted a growing colony of Hoosier artists.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Indianapolis, Collection of Theodore L. Steele, and Archiv. Am. Art, Theodore C. Steele Papers (partially on microfilm) § Mary Elizabeth Steele, "Impressions" (1893; reprinted in Indianapolis Museum of Art, Realities and Impressions: Indiana Artists in Munich, 1880-1890, exh. cat., 1985) § Mary Q Burnet, "Indiana University and T. C. Steele," American Magazine of Art 15 (November 1924): 587-91 § Selma N. Steele, Theodore L. Steele, and Wilbur D. Peat, The House of the Singing Winds: The Life and Work of T. C. Steele (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1966) § William H. Gerdts and Judith Vale Newton, The Hoosier Group: Five American Painters (Indianapolis: Eckert, 1985), with chronology.