William Forsyth (artist)

Forsyth was the first student of the Indiana School of Art in Indianapolis and entered the Munich Academy along with T. C. Steele and J. Ottis Adams in 1882.

Driving east from the SW corner of Section 39,a pink granite monument has been erected to honor the memory of Forsyth (several rows back), together with a bronze bas-relief portrait of the artist (attached thereto).

He was the opposite, and many of his friends and students, and even his daughters, thought that explained a lot about his personality, described by one as that of a "little cocky bantam rooster" whose stature was shorter than most men, which many believed was the catalyst to a "feisty way about him, to make up for his height."

Wilbur Peat, describing the Indianapolis art scene in the 1870s in his "Pioneer Painters of Indiana," remarked that "it is doubtful if the city had anyone among its youthful citizens, with so much zeal for things artistic as he (Forsyth), and with such determination to reach the top in the practice of painting" (p. 205).

But rather than punish him, his parents assigned a large mantel in a vacant room, especially painted black for the purpose, as the appropriate place for his artistic expressions.

Among the scenes Forsyth recalled sketching there with colored chalks were pictures of the Civil War soldiers he would see marching home past as he played outside.

At the age of fifteen, he talked his dad into letting him study art with Barton S. Hays, who, with Jacob Cox, was one of the city's leading artists and a teacher of William Merritt Chase and John Washington Love, but the lessons were too expensive for him to continue.

To fill the void left by the school's closing, Forsyth and other local artists, including Charles Joseph Fiscus (1861-1884), Frederick A. Hetherington (1859-1931), Thomas E. Hibben (1859-1915), Charles Nicolai (1856-1942), and Frank Edwin Scott (1863-1929) formed the Bohé Club (Bohemian Club was too long to fit on a sign on the door window).

"[1] Another letter foretells his future involvement with a group of artists whose goal would be to interpret a particular region "in all the varying moods that are its charm" to the world at large: "Love Hoosierdom?

Forsyth finished his studies in the spring of 1886 but stayed in Europe another two years, sharing a studio with J. Ottis Adams, who would also later be called one of the Hoosier Group.

Steele resigned in 1895, but Forsyth stayed on to teach both day and evening classes until June 1897, when the school was torn down to make way for an expansion of the English Hotel.

With the art school closed, Forsyth began offering classes on his own during the winter and spring months and painting in various places in Indiana and Kentucky during the summer.

In the fall of 1906, he joined the faculty of the Herron School of Art, replacing his friend J. Ottis Adams as the principal instructor of drawing and painting.

[3][4] For those involved, it seemed to capture the spirit of creating together that they had had in their earlier days but lost as success had led them each in more widely scattered directions.

In 1933, the economic pressures of the Great Depression led the school's administrator to let him go, along with daughter Constance, Paul Hadley, and five other teachers.

Forsyth, in his 1916 essay entitled "Art in Indiana," written for the state's centennial, was perhaps the best spokesman for this Hoosier group of artists and the following could easily serve as his epitaph: To live out-of-doors in intimate touch with nature, to feel the sun, to watch the ever changing face of the landscape, where waters run and winds blow and trees wave and clouds move, and to walk with all the hours of the day and into the mysteries of night through all the seasons of the year---this is the heaven of the Hoosier Painter!