Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

T. C. Steele was a leading Indiana artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1880s, he continued his artistic studies in Munich, Germany, where he was trained in the “gray manner,” a realist, academic style characterized by a muted palette, precise underdrawing, and chiaroscuro. Painted in 1884 as his student exhibition piece at Munich’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Boatman, one of Steele’s finest early works, sharply contrasts with his later, and better-known, Impressionist paintings of the southern Indiana landscape. Distinguished by its skillful depiction of the strain of physical labor, The Boatman won a Silver Medal from the Munich academy.