An Indiana Artist: Barbara Rogers Houseworth (1925-2015)

by Ann Massing

Barbara Marie Rogers Houseworth was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on August 11, 1925. She majored in Fine Arts at Indiana University from 1943 to 1946. Her teachers included Robert Elisha Burke (1884-1957), Harry Engel (1901-1970), Robert Laurent (1890-1970), and Steve Green (1917-1999). She married John Horace Houseworth (who was born in Elkhart, Indiana, on August 18, 1918), and they lived in Indianapolis for six years while he finished medical school, completed his internship, and then his residency. Barbara worked at L. S. Ayres doing interior window displays and showed her work in an exhibit of Indiana artists at the John Herron Art Museum. After a year in San Antonio, Texas, then another year in Aurora, Colorado, in 1954 they settled in Urbana, Illinois, where Barbara’s husband joined Carle Clinic, now Carle Foundation Hospital.

In the American Midwest of the 1950s, a woman's place was in the home, and there were few outlets for any artwork produced. So Barbara raised two daughters and was active in the local community--but continued to paint. Although she did exhibit a few times, and even sold some paintings, other than those she gave away, she usually just stuffed them into a drawer to be forgotten. She painted for herself; even her husband was not allowed to participate in her private world.  The paintings were all "experimental." She took up her materials and let go, allowing line, tone, and color to form shapes and figures. Often faces appeared on her paper; there was almost always sadness in her doleful-eyed portraits, usually of someone unknown. Sometimes they were even rather worrying. After her children had grown and left home, she shifted her main interest from painting to the collecting of antiquarian and used books.

In 1956, a neighbor, Larry Connolly, a local high school teacher of English and secretary of the National Council of Teachers of English, approached Barbara to do a map of Homer’s Odyssey for high school literature classes: a commission she launched into with enthusiasm. The amount of time, effort, and  research that she put into the work was not a financial balance, but that undoubtedly never even entered into the equation. It was a channel for her abilities and an opportunity to create something of use, and that was surely worth all she invested over several years. Further similar projects provided an opportunity to research the back streets of London, a city that had always intrigued her. From 1956 to 1966 she produced a series of maps which illustrated landmarks mentioned in books used in high school literature classes: William Shakespeare’s MacBeth and Julius Caesar, Homer’s Odyssey and  Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

Barbara never threw anything away as some artists do, and the quality of her entire oeuvre is remarkable; there are no false starts. Each line she drew was vibrant, her colors alive; creative energy flowed down through her fingertips and guided her brush. Picasso-like, she always achieved an image of interest. She may not always have known what it was or why she painted what she did, but the end result was often vibrating with energy, or contained just a hint of something interesting, something "in the coming."

Flying Kites by Barbara Rogers Houseworth.  ca. 1948. Oil on canvas. Approx. 19" x 15".

The Laundry Lady by Barbara Rogers Houseworth. ca. 1949. Oil on card. Approx. 19" x 11".

A literary map of William Shakespeare’s MacBeth drawn by Barbara Rogers Houseworth. A map of Scotland locating all places mentioned in Shakespeare's play, it contains twelve line drawings illustrating important scenes. 32" x 22". Published by Educational Illustrators, 1957.

A literary map of Homer’s Odyssey--A map of the Mediterranean by Barbara Rogers Houseworth, tracing Ulysses' travels home from the Trojan War, illustrating all of his encounters, including those with Circe, the Cyclopes, and the Lotus-Eaters. 34" x 26". Published by Educational Illustrators, 1959?.

A literary map and illustrations of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities drawn by Barbara Rogers Houseworth. Line drawings highlighting the important scenes from the novel. 31" x 22". Published by Educational Illustrators, 1964?.

Update, January 24, 2015: Ann Massing, daughter of Barbara Rogers Houseworth and author of the article above, has brought out a self-published book on her mother's paintings. You can find the listing for the book at the following website:

www.blurb.com/b/5611400-indiana-born-barbara-rogers-houseworth-one-woman-s

Update, February 2, 2015: I have heard from Ann Massing, daughter of Barbara Rogers Houseworth, that her mother passed away on January 12, 2015, at age eighty-nine. I wish to express my condolences to Ms. Massing and to the Houseworth family for their loss.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Ann Massing
Images are copyrighted by the respective holders of those rights.

Arthur Sinclair Covey (1877-1960)

Arthur Sinclair Covey was born on June 13, 1877, in Leroy, Illinois, and was reared in Missouri and in El Dorado, Kansas. In 1893, Covey "made the run" with the opening of the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma. He followed up a year at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, with art studies in Chicago, Paris, and Munich between 1897 and 1908.

Living in Indianapolis at the turn of the century, Covey drew pictures for the Indianapolis Press before moving on to the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1901. He provided illustrations for magazines, including a series of covers for The American Magazine, during the early part of the century, but he found his life's work in painting murals. His first individual commission was for the Wichita Public Library in 1914. Perhaps his best known series is at the Kohler Company offices in Kohler, Wisconsin. That series, completed in 1921-1922, is the subject of a fine article in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 2009-2010.

Covey married artists in succession. His first wife, Mary Dorothea Sale (d. 1917), was a British citizen and a student of Frank Brangwyn in London, as Covey himself was between 1905 and 1908. In 1921, Covey married Lois Lenski (1893-1974), a children's book author and illustrator famous for her Mr. Small series. In 1928, the couple bought an eighteenth-century house in Harwinton, Connecticut. Called "Greenacres," it would be their home for the rest of Arthur S. Covey's life. One of his last major works was the ceiling of the Trinity Lutheran Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, executed in 1951 when he was seventy-four years old. Covey died nearly a decade later, on February 5, 1960.

"The Run," a lithograph by Arthur Sinclair Covey showing the run on the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma, 1893, in which the artist took part.

"Work," an etching by Covey which appeared in the Sunday Magazine of the Sunday Star, Washington, D.C., August 31, 1913.

A drawing by Covey on the subject of work. It may be a study for a mural, but I don't know the date of the drawing.

Covey's second wife was author and illustrator Lois Lenski. Every child who grew up between the 1930s and the 1970s remembers her Mr. Small series, of which there were ten titles. Policeman Small (1962) was the last.

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Harry Grant Williamson (1866-1937)

Illustrator and landscapist Harry Grant Williamson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on March 31, 1866. He began his art studies at the Art Students' League of Cincinnati, probably as a teenager.  He then followed the example of a group of older Hoosier artists--T.C. Steele, William Forsyth, John Ottis Adams, and Samuel Richards among them--by studying at the Royal Academy in Munich from about 1887 to 1888. From there it was on to Paris and The Hague, where Williamson became enamored of the Dutch landscape and the Dutch art that reflected it. Upon his return to his native country, Williamson enrolled at the Indiana School of Art, where he studied under Steele and Forsyth from 1891 to 1894.

In 1890, Williamson co-founded--along with Steele, Forsyth, and Adams--the Portfolio Club of Indianapolis. The club promoted art in Indianapolis with lectures, meetings, papers, and exhibits throughout the 1890s. Williamson joined his instructor, T.C. Steele, in Vernon, Indiana, in 1893 to paint landscapes. That same year, he contributed a charcoal drawing to the first issue of J.M. Bowles' Modern Art, published in Indianapolis. He also studied under Charles L. McDonald in Indianapolis during the mid-1890s. At about the same time, he worked as a cartoonist for the Indianapolis News.

Williamson's love of Dutch art drew him back to The Netherlands around the middle of the 1890s. He lived there for some time before returning once again to the United States with a Dutch wife, Sara (or Sarah), and a son, Marshall. During the early 1900s, Williamson lived in New Jersey and worked as an illustrator for Harper's, Pearson's, The Saturday Evening Post, and Success. He illustrated or co-illustrated several books including A Son of the Sun by Jack London (1912). Williamson was a member of the Salmagundi Club and the Society of Illustrators. In later years, he painted landscapes.

Williamson died on November 9, 1937, in Edgewater, New Jersey.

So much of the interior illustration for magazine fiction during the early 1900s was done with dark, gloomy charcoal. Harry Grant Williamson's work was no exception. However, as his frontispiece for Vaiti of the Islands by Beatrice Grimshaw (1908) shows, he was capable of working nicely in color media as well.

We look upon illustration of the golden age with nostalgia, realizing that we have lost something in our headlong rush into the future. But the world that read finely made magazines also did its laundry with a tub and a washboard, as in this warm and charming picture by Williamson from 1905.

The previous picture anticipates developments in illustration for the twentieth century. This one harkens back to the nineteenth.

Text copyright 2010, 2024 Terence E. Hanley