Theodore Clement Steele (1847–1926)
4220 T.C. Steele Road, Nashville, IN 47448
812-988-2785
ABOUT
T.C. Steele designed his home, the House of the Singing Winds, and hired a local contractor to build it. He lived on the property during its construction. Steele’s wife Selma N. Steele designed the gardens and orchards and laid out the historic hiking trails. Selma also collected textiles, especially hand knotted rugs and paisley shawls. The Steeles collected and displayed art from all over the world including Native American pottery and textiles, Japanese pottery and books, and Middle Eastern rugs and bowls.
To get the most out of your visit to the historic site, plan to take the buildings tour which includes approximately 50 original paintings and other objects and artifacts in Steele’s Large Studio and his home, the House of the Singing Winds. The site is beautiful all year-round, but visitors in May and June get the best experience of Selma Steele’s formal garden, with historic and heirloom flowers including her wisteria, peonies and iris, in bloom. In early spring, Selma Steele’s daffodils cover the hills, and in fall, the autumn color is on display.
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“We are running away from towns and people, for the hills and woods and sky, and we can get people when we need them.”
— T.C. Steele, 1907
“And it came about that this bit of wilderness emerged from out its obscurity, and became a place of recognition over great distances of country.”
— Selma N. Steele, 1940
Theodore Steele (1847–1926)
Theodore Clement “T.C.” Steele, was born in Gosport, Indiana on September 11, 1847, and died at his home in Brown County on July 24, 1926. T.C. Steele, a noted Indiana painter of portraits and landscapes, studied at the Royal Academy of Munich (1880-1885) before returning home to Indiana, where he would found the Society of Western Artists and the Indiana School of Art that would become the John Herron Art Institute. In 1893 Steele and a group of four Indiana Impressionist landscape painters showed paintings at Chicago’s World’s Fair where they became known as “The Hoosier Group”. He was at the forefront of the state’s art movement and was inducted to the New York School of Design. In 1922 Steele became Indiana University’s first Artist-in-Residence, the “Honorary Professor of Painting”. Steele remains one of Indiana’s most honored artists.
Selma Neubacher Steele (1872–1945)
Selma Steele, the painter’s second wife, was born to Austrian-American parents in Indianapolis and studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York before returning home to teach art at the Herron School. Upon her marriage to Steele in 1907, Selma moved to rural Brown County, Indiana, where she taught herself to raise chickens, bees, flower gardens, and fruit orchards. She lived at the House of the Singing Winds until her death in 1945. Selma Steele was a graphic designer and stencil maker, and the natural world inspired her floral graphic designs. She collected textiles, and designed textiles for use in their home. Selma Steele turned to the design of their personal gardens as her primary creative outlet, as a support and a means to inspire her husband’s landscapes. In 1966, Selma co-wrote House of the Singing Winds, a recollection of her life with Steele.




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When T.C. Steele fell in love with the vistas surrounding the abandoned farm on the hill in Brown County, known as “Bracken Hill,” he invited his then-fiancee Selma Neubacher to take a look at it, to see whether it would do for their honeymoon cottage and summer house. Selma traveled to Brown County with her brother by train and traveled down a deeply rutted road to get to Belmont. By that point she had decided that the adventure was not worth the trouble, but upon seeing the marvelous vistas at the top of the hill, Selma changed her mind and gave her assent for the land to be purchased for the hilltop home. Steele designed the House and hired local construction to build it, and after their wedding in August 1907, Selma Steele walked 2 miles uphill in her wedding shoes to find the red four-room summer bungalow with a pyramid roof, wrapped around by screened porches. At that time, Brown County was a subsistence farming community, and all the neighbors were farmers, the land was clearcut. Steele could see all the way to Bloomington from his house on the hill, specifically “the smokestacks of IU.” The initial plan was for the couple to spend their summers in Brown County, but despite the challenges of such a remote setting, the Steeles loved their home and made it a three-season house, with winters in Indianapolis.
By 1912, the House of the Singing Winds became a year-round residence, and thousands of visitors came to visit the Steele home as though it was public. Artists from around the country, including young Gustave Baumann, made the trip to Brown County, and many decided to move fulltime to Nashville. The Brown County Art Colony grew up in the years that followed. Selma Steele was the hostess for their many visitors, while Steele was out from sunup until evening, painting. The sale of Steele’s paintings supported them, and allowed them to add to the House, build the Little Studio, and finally the Large Studio in 1916. When Steele was invited to become the Honorary Professor of Painting at Indiana University, the Steeles rented a house in Bloomington from 1922-26. Following a winter of ill health, Steele returned to his home in Brown County on July 4, 1926, and died in his bed on July 24, 1926. He is buried in the family cemetery at the site.
T.C. Steele was at the forefront of Indiana’s golden age of Arts and Letters, the 1910s and 1920s. He was one of the first Indiana artists to paint plein air landscapes of his home state, emphasizing Indiana’s natural beauty and advocating for Indiana landscape as suitable and worthy subject for the fine art canvas. Steele’s contemporaries in the Hoosier Group also painted plein air Impressionist-style paintings of the state, scenes of daily life in the cities, towns, and remote areas where they lived. Steele’s Brown County masterpiece, Selma in the Garden, shows the artist’s wife at work in her flower garden, the House of the Singing Winds in the background.
When he was in Indianapolis or Bloomington, Steele was much in demand for his portraits in the German Realist style, and he painted many Indiana governors, an American president (Benjamin Harrison, the only U.S. president from Indiana), and others in and around the state, including presidents and faculty of the state universities and social leaders and business people, including Eli Lilly and Kurt Vonnegut’s great grandfather!