Art and the Indiana Dunes

"It is the wildness and the mystery, the deep solemnity, and the infinite grandeur of this vast region of the dunes which furnish themes of appealing picturesquness."

-Earl Howell Reed, Sr., 1912

 

"An Indiana Wonderland," drawing by Frederick Polley, 1924

The Indianapolis Star via Newspapers.com

'Emblem of Nature's Beauty'

The Indiana Dunes region has captured peoples' imaginations since time immemorial. This mesmerizing land of lines, patterns, contrasts, and moods provides endless opportunities to dazzle the artist. Indiana Dunes National Park protects this legacy of artistic inspriation and expression while continuing to inspire artists for generations to come. In 1923, Chicago Tribune writer William Gingrich wrote:

“Indiana duneland is a place of excessive contrasts. Visitors are impressed by the everlasting struggle for existence and by the signs of endless change apparent on every side... Today there is the thunderous pounding of waves upon the sandy shore. Tomorrow there will be sunshine and the singing of birds. Change, ceaseless change is the order."

 

Jens Jensen proudly leans on the fountain he designed to honor the Prairie Club's efforts to save the Dunes, 1932. This fountain can be found outside of the Indiana Dunes State Park Nature Center today.

Indiana Dunes State Park

Early Artists in Duneland

Chicago's population began to swell in the latter half of the 1800s. From 1880 to 1890, the city's population doubled to over a million inhabitants. For many city-dwellers, the concentration of people necessiated outings to escape into nature. Landscape architect and conservationist Jens Jensen first began to visit the Indiana Dunes in 1889, just five years after emmigrating from Denmark to Chicago. Jensen became enamored with the nature he found around Chicago, later writing of the Dunes:

"They are more poetic, more free, more joyful, something that appeals more to the average human being and which has a greater influence on him than the colder, more severe and overwhelming forms of landscape."

In his book Sacred Sands, J. Ronald Engel wrote of Jensen:

"It not only reminded him of the seacoast of his native Jutland, but symbolized the freedom of movement and equality of opportunity he identified with mid-America... Landscape architect Wilhelm Miller credited Jensen with creating a new Middle West landscape style based on conserving original plant communities and repeating a motif of horizontal lines symbolic of the prairie."

Artists and writers began to take a serious interest in the Dune Country in the 1890s as scientists like Henry Cowles introduced the sandy region to the creative minds around Chicago. People were hungry to leave the noisy cityscape for more peaceful settings, and they were overjoyed with the opportunities found in the Dunes.

 

Etching entitled "Heralds of the Storm" by Earl Howell Reed, Sr., circa 1910

Art Institute Chicago

Author and "Etcher of the Dunes" Earl Howell Reed Sr. was one of the first artists to be associted with the Indiana Dunes. His son remembered going on early sketching trips in the 1890s, but it wasn't until about 1906 that Reed decided to dedicate all of his time to illustrating and describing this landscape. In 1912 he released his first book, The Voices of the Dunes, a collection of etchings and writings. Reed wrote:

"These vast and gloomy dunes are a rich storehouse of material for the poet and artist. To the colorist they present an ever changing panorama of hue and tone. Every cloud that trails its purple phantom-like shadow across them can call forth the resources of his palette if he seeks inspiration in some high nook where the pines still cling to their insecure anchorage. To the etcher they seem peculiarly adapted to interpretation of line. The harmonic undulations of the long serrated ridges, with their sharp accents of gnarled roots and stunted trees, offer infinite possibilities in composition."

He continued:

"To the imaginative enthusiast seeking poetic forms of line expression, these dwarfed, neglected, crippled and wasted things become beautiful and subtle units in artistic arrangement. A man who can draw exactly what he sees is not necessarily an artist. A man who can draw what he feels is an artist. One must feel the spirit and poetry of the dunes if he deals with them as an artist who would send their story out into to the world. The magic of successfu artistic interpretation changes the sense of desolation into the expression of wild, weird beauty and romantic charm. It is the wildness and the mystery, the deep solemnity, and the infinite grandeur of this vast region of the dunes which furnish themes of appealing picturesquness."

 

Working model for Lorado Taft's "Fountain of the Great Lakes" circa 1912

University of Illinois Archives

In 1909, visitor access to Duneland dramatically increased as passenger train service began on the new South Shore Line between Chicago and South Bend, Indiana. Early outdoor enthusiast groups like the Saturday Afternoon Walking Club (later the Prairie Club of Chicago) rapidly exposed the Dunes to artists, and the region's popularity as a source of inspiration and respite began to spread. Around this time, a group of artists and literaries in Hyde Park, Chicago built strong ties to the Dunes. Known as the 57th Street Artist Colony, it included figures such as Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Harriet Monroe, Sherwood Anderson, Lorado Taft, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Henry Blake Fuller. Engel wrote in Sacred Sands:

"With the South Shore railroad only steps away, providing direct access to the Dune Country for weekend outings, the Fifty-seventh Street colony became a center for the creation of Dunes art in the following two decades."

Artists became infused with the first efforts to preserve the Indiana Dunes. In 1916, Prairie Club member and first director of the National Park Service Stephen Mather organized a hearing in Chicago for a proposed Sand Dunes National Park. Among the dozens who spoke on behalf of preserving Indiana's lakefront was Paul Douglas' future father-in-law, Lorado Taft, who said:

"Now, there are two great beauties of this region, two things which are distinctive. One is the lake, and the other is its product, the dunes. When we allow the dunes to be wiped out for a mere matter of 'filling,' we are simply robbing ourselves of a rich heritage from the past, and repeating a tragedy that has often occurred before... If art stands for anything, or if beauty stands for anything, it is because it binds generations of men together. The man who folds his arms and stands alone might be an animal merely. His is the life of an animal. But art lifts us above that plane, and extends forth a hand of welcome to the future.

And so, my friends, I am very happy and proud to be here and to be recorded in this matter as having a word to say for the preservation of this very beautiful spot which so appeals to the imagination. Its vision of vast open spaces, its billows of sand and their silent sentinels; the gestures of its weird trees silhouetted in the twilight— all conspire to make of it an enchanted land. By all means, let us spare no effort to conserve this wonderful place for ourselves and for the generations to follow us."

 

Near today's Porter Beach, thousands gathered in the spring of 1917 in support of a national park at the Indiana Dunes.

Westchester Township History Museum

Mather's hearing on a proposed national park emboldened preservationists. They sought to continue building public support by organizing an enormous outdoor performance event for Memorial Day weekend of 1917. This dramatic masque was written by Thomas Wood Stevens and is entitled Dunes Under Four Flags. Over 1,000 people were involved in the production, and over 25,000 people attended the event. It was organized by the Dunes Pageant Assocation with notable involvement from conservationists Bess Sheehan, Flora Richardson and Dwight Heald Perkins; social reformers Jane Addams, Thomas William Allinson and Graham Taylor; and scientists Henry Cowles and Rollin D. Salisbury.

 

Harriet Monroe, founder and editor of literary journal "Poetry: A Magazine of Verse"

Poetry Foundation Archives

Artists Earl Howell Reed Sr. and Lorado Taft were also involved in the festivities, as well as Poetry magazine's Harriet Monroe, who penned this poem for the pageant:

Flutter on the shore,
Saucy birds!
Foaming waves will roar,
Merry words!
See-they follow after-
Bold are they!
Dance on wings of laughter-
Fly away."

 

Massive, forested dunes and giant slopes of loose sand provided the perfect backdrop for the Dunes Pageant.

A. L. Fitch, circa 1916

Theodore Jessup, member of the Prairie Club, served as a guide at the event. He included the following description in the program guide, which served as inspiration to the press:

"The Dune Country of Indiana represents the work of one hundred times one thousand years, by such artists as the glaciers, water, wind and sun, until you find there a park perfect, beautiful; a fairy land; a land of dreams; a land of remoteness; a land of solitude; a land of long beaches; a land on whose frail shore strong waves beat at times with a thunderous roar; a land so fair and fine no city park could be made to equal it by the expenditure of countless millions."

This "fairy land," dazzled another guide at the event, Clarence G. Dudley, a member of the Prairie Club. Clarence had been photographing the Dunes for a number of years, and it was his photographs that first enticed his brother Frank to the region.

 

"From Mt. Tom" by Frank Dudley, 1941

Indiana State Museum

Frank began to make trips to the Indiana Dunes with the Prairie Club around 1912. He fell in love with the region, and began to paint the Dunes almost exclusively- earning him the title "Painter of the Dunes." His 1918 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago introduced countless of people to Indiana's shore and helped build enthusiam for preservation efforts. Many were shocked to learn the scenes he painted were not of far away places like America's western coast, but from nearby Indiana just 30 miles to the east.

In 1921 Dudley won the prestigous Logan Medal for his piece Duneland, which he sold to the Art Institute. With this money, he built a studio and cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan where he lived with his wife Maida nearly year-round for over three decades. The Indiana Dunes State Park was established in 1925 with the Dudleys' cabin within the park's boundaries. Dudley was required to 'pay rent' to the state by producing one painting a year, which he continued to do until his death in 1957.

 

Artist-in-Residence Program

They came, they created, they inspired.

National parks have been the source of inspiration for well-known artists, such as Thomas Moran, Albert Bierdstadt, and Frank Dudley, who have visually depicted the cultural and natural treasures of our great American heritage. These beautiful works are cherished by park visitors and for future generations. Indiana Dunes National Park invites you to become a part of this legacy in our two week Artist-in-Residence Program.