The Hoosier Group

The Hoosier Group is the cornerstone of the Haan collection and one of the most important chapters in American regional art history. The designation was first given to five artists in 1894 at an exhibition in Chicago, and the Haan displays the most significant private collection of their work in Indiana.

These artists trained in Munich and Paris — absorbing the light-filled techniques of French Impressionism — before returning to Indiana to paint its rolling hills, golden fields, and wooded creek valleys. Their canvases are alive with the particular quality of Midwestern light: warm, soft, and deeply familiar to anyone who has watched an Indiana sunset.

T.C. Steele (Theodore Clement Steele, 1847–1926)

T.C. Steele is the undisputed master of Indiana painting and the artist most closely associated with the Haan Museum’s identity. The museum holds some of the finest examples of his mature work, including large-format landscapes painted during his years in Brown County, where he settled in 1907 and established his home and studio — now the T.C. Steele State Historic Site.

Steele’s paintings are marked by confident brushwork, a bold approach to color, and an intimate understanding of the Indiana landscape across all seasons. His canvases draw more visitors to the Haan than any other single artist in the collection.

J. Ottis Adams (1851–1927)

Adams was a founding member of the Hoosier Group and a close friend of T.C. Steele. He painted the Whitewater River valley and the countryside around Brookville with a lyrical sensitivity to water, mist, and the changing moods of the Indiana sky. His works at the Haan reveal a painter deeply attentive to atmosphere and seasonal light.

William Forsyth (1854–1935)

Forsyth was both a celebrated painter and an influential teacher — for decades the head of the art department at the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. His landscapes and figure studies show a painter comfortable with both the intimacy of domestic settings and the grandeur of the outdoor world.

Otto Stark (1859–1926)

Stark brought the lessons of his Paris training to Indiana with particular elegance. His work ranges from intimate interiors and figure paintings to landscapes, and his handling of light — filtered through windows or falling across a field — is among the most refined in the Hoosier Group.

R.B. Gruelle (Richard Buckner Gruelle, 1851–1914)

Gruelle was the most urban of the Hoosier Group, spending much of his career in Indianapolis. His paintings include portraits, figure studies, and landscapes, and he was a tireless advocate for the arts in Indiana through his writing and public engagement.

The Brown County Art Colony

When T.C. Steele moved to Brown County in 1907, he set off a migration. Artists from across the country followed, drawn by the dramatic topography of Indiana’s hill country — its mist-filled hollows, covered bridges, wood-smoke cabins, and brilliant autumn colors. By the 1920s, Nashville, Indiana had become one of the most visited art colonies in the United States.

The Haan collection includes work from the most accomplished painters of this movement, including:

Ada Shulz and Adolph Shulz

The Shulz family came from Wisconsin and became central figures in the Brown County colony. Adolph Shulz’s landscapes are known for their atmospheric softness and sensitivity to seasonal change. Ada Shulz’s work brings a warm domesticity to the colony’s canon. Their names live on in the museum’s ‘Shulz’ membership tier — a recognition of their enduring place in Indiana art history. The collection includes Adolph Shulz’s Scrapped, an oil on canvas depicting an abandoned wagon beside a barn, characteristic of his ability to find beauty in working rural life.

E.K. Williams

Williams arrived from Wisconsin and developed a distinctive palette — often working in silvery greens and blues — that set his work apart from the warmer tones favored by some of his contemporaries.

Adam Emory Albright and Lucie Hartrath

Albright and Hartrath brought a Chicago sensibility to Brown County. Albright is known for his paintings of children in sunlit outdoor settings; Hartrath for luminous landscapes that approach the decorative beauty of tonalist painting.

Pioneer and Regionalist Painters

The Haan collection extends beyond the Impressionist movement to include painters who defined Indiana’s visual culture in earlier and later generations.

Pioneer Painters: Barton Hays and Jacob Cox

Among the earliest Indiana painters represented in the collection, Hays and Cox worked in the mid-to-late 19th century, before European training became the norm for Indiana artists. Their paintings offer a window into Indiana’s frontier and early settlement era — landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes painted with directness and an eye for the American scene.

Richmond Artists: John Elwood Bundy and Maude Eggemeyer

The Richmond school contributed some of the most beloved Impressionist landscapes in the Haan collection. John Elwood Bundy — whose name graces one of the museum’s membership tiers — painted the Indiana countryside with a lyrical, almost musical quality. Maude Eggemeyer brought a delicate touch to floral and landscape subjects that made her one of the most admired painters working in Indiana during the first half of the 20th century.

Regionalist Painters: Robert Weaver and Harry Davis

Working in the tradition of American Regionalism, Weaver and Davis depicted Indiana’s rural life and working landscapes with documentary precision and genuine affection. Their work sits comfortably alongside the Impressionist tradition in the collection while representing a distinct approach to Indiana subject matter.

Floyd Hopper

A landscape painter working in a bold, expressive style rooted in the Regionalist tradition, Hopper’s Night Train captures an Indiana valley at night — a steam locomotive trailing smoke against a dramatic sky, farmhouses below, and telephone poles dividing the composition. It is one of the more cinematic paintings in the collection, and among the most striking examples of mid-20th century Indiana landscape painting.

Contemporary Indiana Painters

The Haan collection does not end with the 20th century. The museum actively collects and displays work by contemporary Indiana painters across a range of styles — from expressive abstraction to photo-realism and everything between.

Alice Mae Engron — Abstract

Engron’s Engron Abstract is one of the most visually arresting canvases in the collection. A large-format oil on canvas, it combines swirling geometric forms, radiating lines, and metallic accents in a palette of deep crimson, cobalt blue, and coral orange. It represents the museum’s commitment to collecting work that challenges as much as it delights.

Andrew Hensel — Surrealist and Narrative Painting

Hensel’s Manzo (Scary Toys) is a tour-de-force of narrative painting in the tradition of Northern European fantasy — a densely packed composition in sepia tones, filled with toys, monsters, and unsettling imagery that invites prolonged looking. It is among the most discussed paintings in the collection for the questions it provokes.

Cha Kwang — Impressionist and Textural Work

Cha Kwang’s Monet’s Pond is a textural feast — thick impasto brushwork building up masses of pink and coral wildflowers against an open sky. It demonstrates the continued vitality of the Impressionist tradition in contemporary hands, and connects the museum’s historic holdings to living practice.