Cultured Wednesday: Steele’s Ohio River

This is a beautiful painting of the Ohio river viewed from Logan’s Point in Hanover, IN, where the Ohio forms the border between Indiana on the northern bank and Kentucky on the southern.  Featured is a photo of the spot.

Theodore Clement Steele (11 September 1847 – 24 July 1926) was an American Impressionist painter known for his Indiana landscapes, one of the most famous of Indiana’s Hoosier Group painters.

From a genealogical standpoint, Steele’s family tree has an interesting twist in it that would mess up all the automated relationship-identifiers on online trees:  After his first wife Libby had died in 1899, Steele married again in 1907.  His new wife Selma was the older sister of his son-in-law Gustave, who had married Steele’s daughter Daisy two years prior.  Good luck with that on ancestry.com because his daughter thus became also his sister(-in-law), and to Daisy, Steele became both father and brother(-in-law).

Regardless, T.C. Steele, whom art experts consider the state’s best-known landscape artist, surely did a lot during his life to further the arts in Indiana, and we find his painting of the Ohio river simply delightful.  Makes you want to go and visit Logan’s Point, doesn’t it?