A photo of Steele, Mary (Steele’s wife), John Ottis Adams, Adams’s wife, and friends. This photo was taken at Metamora, Indiana in 1898, shortly before Mary died. http://images.indianahistory.org

T.C. Steele married his first wife, Mary Elizabeth Lakin, in 1870. Steele and Mary were married for twenty-nine years before she passed away in November, 1899. Mary died at the age of forty-nine and suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for five years before her death. Mary’s illness affected Steele’s work, because he constantly worried about her. Later after her death, Steele told his son, “You know, of course, that I owe everything to your Mother. It was she who made a landscape painter of me, instead of a portrait painter.”

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