page_title: William Forsyth (artist)
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: William Forsyth (artist) / Background
caption_attribution_description: William J. Forsyth (1854–1935)
context_page_description: William J. Forsyth was an American Impressionist painter who was part of the "Hoosier Group" of Indiana artists.
  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. He later returned to Indiana in 1888 and was instrumental in founding the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, serving as an instructor there until 1933. He died March 29, 1935 and was subsequently buried in Section 39, Lot 298 Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, Indiana. Driving east from the SW corner of Section 39, a pink granite monument has been erected to honor the memory of Forsyth, together with a bronze bas-relief portrait of the artist.
  Forsyth is one of the five members of Indiana's most important group of artists, the Hoosier Group. His work is in many important private collections and several museums including the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, Indiana State Museum, and Indianapolis Museum of Art. The Family Forsyth exhibit displays works by William Forsyth, Constance Forsyth, and Robert Selby at the Irvington Historical Society, Sep. 5 - Nov. 11, 2018.
context_section_description: It was perhaps no accident that William Forsyth described his teacher, John Love, as a "tall, . . . blond giant." 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." - (Judith Vale Newton, The Hoosier Group (Indianapolis, Eckert Publications, 1985), 131.)
  Forsyth's "feistiness" earned a reputation for a quick temper and for being "ornery", a lover of a good argument. 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).  Short in stature, Forsyth became very well known in the history of art in Indiana, and especially among those artists buried at Crown Hill.
caption: Self-portrait, 1923
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