A Minister to the Eye

The Ashokan Reservoir Series by Zulma Steele

B ruce W e B er Independent Art Historian

Zulma Steele’s aspiration as a landscape painter reached its peak with the creation in 1914 and 1915 of a series of paintings of Ulster County’s Ashokan Reservoir and the surrounding mountainsides. The complete size and scope of this luminous series is not known.1

Six paintings were acquired from Steele’s estate after her death in 1979 by Jean and Jim Young of West Hurley, New York.2 One of these, Headwaters of the Ashokan Reservoir (fig.1), is now in a different private collection in Woodstock. The group captures the beauty of the reservoir and its environs as the project neared completion and the reservoir was still being filled with water. The paintings range from panoramic views of the reservoir and the mountain ranges in the distance, to more intimate glimpses of the water and the nearer terrain. Four of the works feature the reservoir’s east basin, and two picture the west basin. Steele inscribed the titles on the back of several paintings in black ink, along with her name.

The Making Of The Ashokan Reservoir

The Ashokan Reservoir is the oldest New York City-owned reservoir in the Catskill Mountains (fig. 2).3 It is situated fourteen miles west of the Hudson River at Kingston and is approximately four miles walking distance from the village of Woodstock to its eastern edge in West Hurley. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Croton Reservoir in Westchester County was deemed insufficient to supply the water needs of New York City’s growing population through the coming decades. In 1905, New York’s Board of Water Supply was empowered to develop and implement a plan to expand the city’s water system. They focused on the Esopus Creek in the Catskill Mountains of Ulster County, which, as early as 1886, had been proposed as a potential water source. Almost twenty years later, the board formally proposed the Ashokan Reservoir and the accompanying Catskill Aqueduct to slake the city’s burgeoning thirst. The Catskill Aqueduct would bring the drinking water from the reservoir more than ninety miles to the Kensico Reservoir, just north of White Plains. There it would mix with water from the Delaware Aqueduct and flow a few more miles into the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, from which it would be distributed to the city’s five boroughs.

The Board of Water Supply’s plan for the Ashokan Reservoir placed its center near Brown’s Station and called for the flooding of thousands of acres of land used for farming, logging, and quarrying. More than 2000 residents would have to be relocated and some 1,200 acres of homes, barns, mills, stores, churches, graveyards, orchards, farms, pastures, and quarries cleared. The land was acquired under eminent domain over the strenuous objection of local opponents, including those who had initially resisted moving from the area or demanded additional financial compensation, and those who feared that this was just the start of New York’s plan to suck Ulster County dry. Many were also fearful that the dam would loom as a perpetual menace to people and towns downstream. Finally, some opponents believed the reservoir would not hold enough water even for the city’s immediate needs.4 In the face of the opposition, an equitable method for establishing the financial value of the land was established, even as many residents ordered to move continued to fight the issue vigorously in the courts.5

Time has borne out the value and the success of the controversial reservoir, and local fears proved unfounded. The project was constructed jointly between 1907 and 1915 by MacArthur Brothers Company and Winston and Company, enlisting the labor of thousands of workers. After the Esopus Creek, a major tributary of the Hudson River, was dammed, construction of the reservoir itself commenced. Today, it consists of a chain of masonry and earth dams and dikes with a combined length of five and a half miles. Rising to a height of two hundred feet, the Ashokan Reservoir is 196 feet thick at its base, holds 122.9 million gallons of water at full capacity, and continues to supply New York City with a staggering 40 percent of its drinking water during drought periods.

The Ashokan Reservoir was broken into upper (west) and lower (east) basins, and the reservoir extends from the headwaters of the creek, close to Boiceville in the upper basin, down to the lower basin in West Hurley. A causeway runs between the basins, providing a connection for people traveling between the northern and southern sides of the reservoir. The upper basin borders the relocated villages of Boiceville, Olive, Olivebridge, Shokan, and West Shokan, and the lower basin borders the relocated villages of Ashokan, Glenford, West Hurley, and the original (non-relocated) village of Stony Hollow.

In March 1912, workers were hired to remove every tree, bush, orchard, fence, grave, house, and farm from what would become the reservoir floor. This process of demolition ended when construction of the dam was coming to completion in September 1913. By late spring of that year, the landscape was a scene of desolation and ruin. As journalist Ella Lockwood Loomis reported in the Kingston Daily Freeman, it looked as if “a conquering army had recently marched through the territory,” and the writer E. G. Nimsgern accurately forecasted that, when fully cleared, the tract would be “more barren of vegetation than the barren Sahara.”6

Following the end of construction in September 1913, the Board of Water Supply stopped the flow of the Esopus Creek and allowed the water to accumulate. Initially, the Esopus flowed at a rate of 22 cubic feet per second. In The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir, Bob Steuding reports that the summer had been dry, and the waters of the area seemed to be stalled while “others said the bottom of the reservoir was porous, and it would take some sort of expensive compound to caulk the leaks—it seemed like the reservoir would never fill.” 7 But by the end of 1913, a succession of heavy storms filled the west basin to half its capacity. In mid-December the water in the basin had reached a level of approximately 100 feet and impounded over sixty million gallons of water.

The flooding of the Ashokan Reservoir was completed in early December 1914. Six months later, the Board of Water Supply announced that, after more than seven years of work, water from the Catskill system was fully available for New York City. The Poughkeepsie Eagle News reported that it was now “possible to use the water from the Ashokan Reservoir in any part of the five boroughs of Greater New York. It will only be necessary to connect the supply from the aqueduct to the pipes leading to whatever section will need it most.”8

Once the vast tract that had been denuded as if by an invading army was fully submerged, the Ashokan Reservoir area was instantly recognized as one of the most beautiful locales in New York State. It soon became a favorite attraction and source of enchantment and relaxation for tourists and area residents alike.9

On its completion, The New York Times called Ashokan the “greatest reservoir in the world” and deemed the complexity of its construction comparable to the building of the Egyptian pyramids.10 Picture postcards celebrated the reservoir’s seamless combination of artificial and natural beauty.11 For many, the reservoir looked like a natural mountain lake surrounded by wilderness. T.

Morris Longstreth wrote admiringly of the Ashokan Reservoir in his travel book The Catskills, published in 1918. For him, the reservoir was— a revelation of completed beauty. The lake was so beautiful, fitted so well into border-land of mountain and plain, that it did not look raw and new. . . . The construction and the setting are beautiful beyond the first visit to comprehend. Already its magnificence is known, and soon will be justly famous. When the [thousands of] trees that are planted [around the artificial lake to form a forest buffer] have grown, and when the edges of the lake will have taken to themselves a wildness consonant to the mountain setting, then the forty-mile circle will have become a part of every motorist’s itinerary. The Kingston people and the inhabitants of the by-lying villages must feel themselves translated, after so long staring across a waterless plain. With mountain-ranges, vistas of ravines, pine-covered points, waters sacred to the sun and forever free from spoliation . . . the simple and straightforward architecture of spillway and dividing weir, and ever the ribbon of road against the hills –nothing more is needed to minister to the eye.12

The Creation Of The Ashokan Reservoir Series

Inspired by the stunning transformation of the landscape south and west of West Hurley, Zulma Steele depicted the Ashokan Reservoir from a variety of picturesque and dra- matic vantage points as it was being filled over the course of 1914. These works are the culmination of her development as a painter during the first decades of the twentieth century, and they rank among the finest landscapes created in the Woodstock art colony during this time.

Woodstock writer Tad Wise has surmised that Steele’s favorite spot from which to see and depict the Ashokan Reservoir was looking south from Winchell’s Corners, located a short distance north of the reservoir at the intersection of route 28 and Reservoir Road in the town of Shokan, which is 6.2 miles west of West Hurley and 4.2 miles east of Boiceville 13 Thanks to the assistance of lifelong area residents Marty Guliano and Bob Steuding, it has been possible to identify positively some of the locations and mountains depicted in the series and at least to speculate intelligently on others.

Headwaters of the Ashokan Reservoir (fig. 1) pictures the far western edge of the reservoir in Boiceville, where the Esopus Creek enters the reservoir. Samuels Point may be the mountain commanding the background. West Hurley Clearing—Ashokan Reservoir (fig. 3) features the reservoir’s far eastern edge. We do not know whether the painting looks north, toward Overlook Mountain in Woodstock, or south, toward High Point. The Lower Reservoir (fig. 4) looks west toward the Burroughs Range of

High Peaks. Named after the great nature essayist John Burroughs, the range consists of Cornell Mountain, Slide Mountain, and Wittenberg Mountain.

Picnic, Ashokan Reservoir, New York (fig. 5) is a closer view of the lower basin looking west and features South Mountain, the Burroughs Range, and Mount Ticeteneyck 14 The Big Mountain, Ashokan Reservoir (fig. 6) looks west from the lower basin toward the High Peaks, and pictures High Mountain, Hoop Pole Mountain, and South Mountain. Weidner Point thrusts into the reservoir in the foreground. Finally, Upper Reservoir, Ashokan (fig. 7) is a vividly romantic view of the Ashokan Reservoir, with South Mountain, Peekamoose Mountain, Table Mountain, and Balsam Cap Mountain all pictured in the purple haze of the distance.

Exhibiting The Ashokan Reservoir Series

Steele exhibited paintings from the Ashokan Reservoir series in New York City from December 1914 through November 1915 and then sporadically over the following two and a half years in Baltimore, Chicago, and Elmira, New York. Catalogue listings and exhibition reviews provide the following titles: High Point Mountain, Across Cleared Land, Cleared Lands of the Ashokan Reservoir, Overlooking the

Reservoir, and Ashokan Reservoir. Frustratingly, it is not possible to match these titles positively to the known paintings in the series. Following their showing, Steele may have decided to give the works remaining in her possession descriptive titles, so that future viewers would at least be able to identify the general areas depicted.

In December 1914, Steele exhibited High Point Mountain and Across Cleared Land in a showing of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors at the Arlington Gallery in Manhattan.15 It is likely that Across Cleared Land is the painting titled Cleared Lands of the Ashokan Reservoir, which was shown at the association’s exhibition the following March and April at Manhattan’s Anderson Galleries. A critic for the Brooklyn Eagle considered Steele’s contribution to this show to be “an advance on previous exhibitions” and singled out her Ashokan Reservoir painting as one of the best landscapes in the show 16

In February 1915, Steele exhibited five works from the Ashokan Reservoir series at the MacDowell Club in Manhattan 17 The titles of these pictures are not known; it appears that no catalogue for the show was undertaken, and the works are not identified by name in the exhibition reviews that have been located. Yet the paintings arrested the attention of critics from both the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Brooklyn Life. The Eagle’s critic remarked, “Zulma

Steele has no indecisive way of telling in her five canvases the pictorial story of the country about the great Ashokan Dam and Reservoir, giving perspective to the planes in the lower levels and also on the mountain sides. Simplicity and directness are her effective keynotes and her love for color makes her canvases glow.”18 The critic for Brooklyn Life related that the pictures shown at the MacDowell Club “were in Miss Steele’s usually vigorous style and beside their artistic merit attracted attention on account of the historic interest in their subjects—the valley of the new Catskill reservoir at different stages of the work.”19

In November 1915, Steele exhibited a group of more modestly scaled and sketchier paintings of the reservoir and the surrounding area at an exhibition of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors at the Arlington Art Galleries. The Brooklyn Eagle reported: Zulma Steele, “who painted large canvases of the Ashokan Dam region, that were shown months ago at the MacDowell Club, Manhattan, strikes a more spirited and sketchy note in her smaller works here on view, comprising the lower lake, the bridge and mountains beyond the Esopus. Very bright and attractive they are.”20

In November 1915, Steele exhibited Ashokan Reservoir at the twenty-eighth annual exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. A work of the same title would be shown in early 1918 at an exhibition of the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors held at the Peabody Gallery, Baltimore, where a critic for the Baltimore Sun praised the canvas as “a subject painted by an artist who knows her values and feels the line and curve of the mountain and valley.”21 From Baltimore, this painting toured to the association’s exhibition at the Arnot Art Gallery in Elmira, New York, with the title changed to Overlooking the Reservoir. A writer for the local newspaper commented that the “atmosphere, color and perspective of ‘Overlooking the Reservoir’ by Zulma Steele, makes this picture one of the most attractive in the collection.”22

Becoming Modern

From 1904 to 1912, Steele’s landscapes advanced stylistically from the muted, shimmering, poetic Tonalist aesthetic she imbibed in Woodstock under Birge Harrison’s tutelage (fig. 8), to the emergence, about 1910, of an Impressionist style influenced by her recent study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with Frank

W. Benson and Edmund C. Tarbell.23 This led her to render brighter effects, adopt a more varied and colorful palette, and employ more active and dynamic brushwork (fig. 9).

Harrison had been instrumental in providing Steele the aesthetic instruments that enabled her to create her awe-inspiring vision of the Ashokan Reservoir. In addition to teaching her and his other students techniques for rendering luminosity, refraction, vibration, and atmospheric perspective, he expounded on the importance of the “‘big vision’— the power to see and to render the whole of a given scene or picture motive. . . . the power to give the essential [and] paint the atmosphere which surrounds the objects....”24

In 1913, Steele reportedly attended the International Exhibition of Modern Art, better known as the Armory Show, which was held from February 17 to March 15 at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory in Manhattan.25 Depending on one’s point of view, the show was an epiphany or a cataclysm in the history of art in America. Either way, it caused Americans to recognize and consider the avant-garde European artistic styles of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism, and it spurred American artists to explore new and more experimental directions. Steele’s verbal response to the European avant-garde art she saw at the Armory Show is not recorded, but the paintings she created over the course of 1913 through 1917 reveal the direct impact of the exhibition. Indeed, in 2018, The New York Times art critic Grace Glueck called Zulma Steele a “progressive-minded artist” who produced work “considered avant-garde enough for a cutting-edge show at the National Arts Club in 1914.”26

By the latter part of 1913, Steele had certainly advanced beyond working in styles indebted to Tonalism and Impressionism and ventured into a more subjective and experimental manner of painting. Around this time, she created landscapes featuring bold, pure colors, simplified shapes, strong rhythmic patterning, and tightly structured designs (figs. 10 and 11). She often applied paint with tiny dot, square, or dash-like strokes, which hark back in style to the Pointillist canvases of the Frenchmen George Seurat and Maurice Denis.27

As Glueck commented, the advances Steele was making as a painter led to her inclusion in the Exhibition of Contemporary Art held at the National Arts Club in New York in March 1914. This ambitious group exhibition featured 143 pieces highlighting recent tendencies in modern American art.28 The works were considered experimental and of an advanced nature, exemplifying the sensibilities of America’s most progressive artists. Among the thirty-one artists were such leading stalwarts of modernism as Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Steele’s fellow Woodstocker Andrew Dasburg, whose Cubist portraits of the art patron Mabel Dodge were the succès de scandale of the showing. Steele exhibited four landscapes at the exhibition—Beyond the Farm, Purple Hills, Indian Head Mountain, and First Snow—none of which have surfaced.

The Style And Color Of The Ashokan Reservoir Series

In her Ashokan Reservoir series of 1914 and early 1915 (figs. 1, 3-7), Steele carefully built up planes and established a solid underlying structure. The paintings have strongly defined foregrounds and are marked by a deep and airy rendering of space. In Picnic, Ashokan Reservoir, New York and The Lower Reservoir, the composition is bisected by a zigzagging watercourse that winds its way through the dry, low-lying landscape. Art historian Carol Lowery has noted that, in the second work, the “screen of dark foliage and wildflowers in the lower register indicated Steele’s penchant for incorporating local plants and flowers in her art as well as her awareness of the principles of Japanese design.”29

The artist placed a variety of mixed and unmixed pigments side by side on her canvases, including a scattering of small dots, squares, or dashes of brightly pigmented paint. These mosaic-like gestures are interwoven with a broad range of vigorously applied brushwork. Areas of water and mountains are generally painted as broad, sweeping masses. Steele employed color for expressive purposes, and her broad range of tinted and saturated colors captures the magnificent beauty and sublimity of the vistas that attracted her eye.

In her works in this series, Steele’s palette is dominated by viridian and cadmium greens and by cobalt, ultramarine, and turquoise blues. She includes myriad additional colors—violets, purples, reds, oranges, pinks, and off-whites among them. Colors are often accented with touches of raw sienna, and the hues are deeper and more saturated in the foreground, in tone paler and more delicate in the background. Skies come alive with short dashes of soft-tinted colors, ranging in hue from pink, lavender, and blue to off-white.

The Impact Of William Emile Schumacher And Arthur Wesley Dow

The artist’s paintings of the period 1913-1917 were influenced by the example of William Emile Schumacher (fig. 12). In the late 1890s, this Boston-bred painter was profoundly moved in Paris by Art Nouveau and by the work of the Post-Impressionist George Seurat and the Nabi painters Maurice Denis and Edouard Vuillard. Under these influences, he broke his compositions into prismatic patterns, employed dot- and dash-like strokes, and incorporated vivid hues of complimentary colors. On his return to America from France in the summer of 1912, Schumacher concentrated on painting imaginative, whimsical, and boldly patterned and colored landscapes and still lifes, all marked by an increasingly abstract handling of form. Over the course of his career, he maintained his belief in the importance of the unity of color and form, and the significance of the imaginative mind.

Schumacher was responsible for revitalizing the painting department at Byrdcliffe, bringing an avantgarde spirit to this bastion of the Arts and Crafts movement. 30 He taught painting at Byrdcliffe from the summer of 1913 until shortly before his death, in Woodstock, in 1931. Steele readily came under his stylistic influence. She took advantage of the opportunity to learn from his example and likely attended his Byrdcliffe painting classes. Under Schumacher’s spell, she began to forge a compromise between traditional landscape painting and advanced modernist abstraction through her boldly colored palette and patchwork application of pigments. 31

The artist’s Ashokan Reservoir series was also influenced by compositional strategies she learned from her study with Arthur Wesley Dow at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn during 1899-1903. Dow considered decorative treatment in composition an integral part of a good picture, and he held that line, mass, and color rank as the chief elements of such treatment. He taught his students that there were five subordinate forms of composition, or “art structure”: opposition, transition, subordination, repetition, and symmetry. He counseled them to treat landscape “first as a design, afterward as a picture” and regarded painting essentially as a rhythmic harmony of colored spaces.32 For him, painting a picture was “the cutting up of a space by a line, and then adding color, but you must first learn how to manage the lines.”33

Steele may have been inspired to undertake her Ashokan Reservoir paintings after seeing Dow’s series of pictures of the Grand Canyon, which were the subject of his exhibition The Color of the Grand Canyon of Arizona , held at Montross Gallery in New York in April 1913 (fig. 13). His visit to the American southwest in the winter of 1911–1912 inspired him to abandon his usual palette of relatively muted hues and use instead a range of brilliant colors. Art critics of the time considered Dow’s Grand Canyon paintings a great breakthrough for American painting because of their combination of large scale and all-over painterly color patterns, rich with pulsing purples and oranges. In his own foreword to the catalogue of his New York exhibition, Dow explained that what had attracted him most to the Grand Canyon was “first of all—color, ‘burning bright’ or smoldering under ash-grays. . . . At sunset the ‘temples’ are flaming red-orange glorified like the Egyptian god in his sanctuary.” 34

A Flickering Of Inspiration

For Zulma Steele, the inspirational flame of landscape painting flickered and dimmed after she moved to France in the late summer or early fall of 1918. At this time, in the waning months of the Great War, she volunteered with the Red Cross, under whose auspices she took charge of recreation at a large camp hospital between Chartres and Brest.35 She stayed with the organization after the Armistice in November, and remained abroad for more than a year in total.

Following the completion of her Red Cross assignment Steele was permitted to live and paint in shell-ravaged Verdun, then a closed area. On returning to Woodstock in mid to late 1919, she utilized sketches she had made on the bottoms and sides of cigar boxes to create a group of large landscape paintings. Alas, their whereabouts are unknown. By 1922, she began to turn her primary attention from painting to ceramics, and during the course of that summer she was also active as a teacher of pottery, instructing advanced classes, along with Bertha Thompson, at Byrdcliffe.36 The post-World War I years would distance Steele further and further from her major achievement of the mid-teens, when she created her remarkable series of paintings of the new Ashokan Reservoir.

Notes

1 Dating from around 1915 is a group of four monotype prints by Steele featuring related views of the reservoir (see p. 85). Art historian and curator Patricia Phagan has noted that the works “show the reservoir in different stages of development and were printed as postal cards in black ink, sometimes accompanied by a bright blue painted ink and hand coloring with watercolor.” Patricia Phagan, “Made in Woodstock: Printmaking from 1903 to 1945,” essay in Made in Woodstock: Printmaking from 1903 to 1945 (Poughkeepsie, New York: The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 2002), 2. The artist’s interest in creating handmade postcards derived from her involvement with the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors postal design competitions of 1915 and 1916. Steele’s delicately colored monotype The Big Mountain (see fig. 17 in Tom Wolf’s essay in this catalogue), features a closeup view of High Point. In preparation for painting her series Steele likely created numerous small outdoor oil sketches. An oil sketch painted from Glenford Hill in the town of Glenford (located close to West Hurley off route 28), features a view southwest over the reservoir with High Point Mountain in the background. The sketch was formerly in the collection of Theodore and Judy Wassmer of Woodstock. An image of the picture is located in the Zulma Steele research material in the Woodstock Artists Association Archives.

2 “Works of Early Ashokan Painter Surfaces in Dump,” Kingston Daily Freeman (July 21, 1982). In 1982, the Youngs lent Steele’s Ashokan Reservoir paintings to an exhibition of her work held at the Paradox Gallery in Woodstock. For a review of this exhibition see Tram Combs, “Delicacies of Steele at Paradox,” Woodstock Times (July 15, 1982). The paintings were next shown in an exhibition of Steele’s art held in 2005 at the Spanierman Gallery in New York.

3 My discussion of the development, construction and filling with water of the Ashokan Reservoir is indebted to Bob Steudings’s The Last of the Handmade Dams: The Story of the Ashokan Reservoir rev. ed. (Fleischmanns, NY: Purple Mountain Press, Ltd., 1989). The name “Ashokan” first appears in Dutch records of the seventeenth century and is believed to be a corruption of the Iroquois word meaning “place of fishes.”

4 Officials in New York City were concerned that locals would respond with violence to the plan to build the Ashokan Reservoir, but nothing of the kind occurred.

5 In his book on the Ashokan Reservoir, Bob Steuding relates (84) that the Board of Water Supply was given the authority to reach an equitable agreement with property owners on monetary compensation. He further relates that a great number of Ashokan residents nonetheless fought the issue of financial compensation in the Kingston courts. Steuding also notes that, in the long run, property owners gained little or nothing by taking legal action. He further points out that 80 percent of the nearly 2000 permanent residents who were forced to move remained within twenty-five miles of their old homes, relocating to communities along the reservoir’s banks. Among other actions, the city moved a railroad line several miles from its old right-of-way, and rebuilt many miles of road.

6 Ella Lockwood Loomis’s article in the Kingston Daily Freeman on the ravaged appearance of old Ashokan is cited in Steuding, 99; E. G. Nimsgern, Illustrated and Descriptive Account of the Main Dams and Dikes of the Ashokan Reservoir (Brown Station, New York: Published by E. G. Nimsgern, 1909), 9.

7 Bob Steuding, The Last of the Handmade Dams, 193.

8 “Ashokan Reservoir Available,” Poughkeepsie Eagle News, (June 16, 1915), 1.

9 Chief engineer Alfred Douglas Flinn had promised that, after the completion of the reservoir, there would remain “the bracing air, the attractive scenery, and the abundant rainfall; and thousands of holiday seekers [flocking] thither. . . .The city. . .is not destroying large commercial or agricultural industries, but is simply making the highest use of one of the principle resources of the region, its water.” Alfred Douglas Flinn, “The World’s Greatest Aqueduct: Water from the Catskill Mountains to the City of New York,” Century Magazine 58 (September 1909): 711.

Picnicking was a common leisure activity on the shore of the new reservoir. A group of picnickers appears in the foreground of Steele’s Picnic, Ashokan Reservoir, New York. By 1917, picnicking was under threat of being curtailed due to the “utter disregard of decent conduct by picnic parties, most of whom scatter papers and uneaten lunch on the grounds surrounding the reservoir and in the lake itself . . . .” “Fishing Allowed on Ashokan Lake,” Kingston Daily Freeman (August 28, 1917), 6.

10 This was noted in Linda W. Foderaro, “‘Watery Graves’ Was No Figure of Speech; A Receding City Reservoir Reveals a Turbulent Past,” The New York Times (May 14, 2002), section B, 1.

11 In September 1916, the periodical Motor Travel reported that the Ashokan Reservoir accomplished its goals “without detracting in the least from the natural attractiveness of the locale.” “Motoring to Deerslayer’s Country,” Motor Travel 8 (September 1916): 23.

12 T. Morris Longstreth, The Catskills (New York: The Century Company, 1918), 269, 271-272. The attractiveness of the park was due in major part to Charles W. Leavitt, Charles A. Gregory and A. Underhill, three of the foremost landscape engineers in America. Upon their hiring in 1909 the Kingston Daily Freeman promised that “The reservoir itself will form one of the most picturesque spots in America, visible from nearly all of the peaks in the Catskill range, and judging from the work heretofore done by the engineers in charge, the natural features of the scenery will be preserved so as to give the entire scene a nature-made and not a man-made look.” “Ashokan Park to Be a Beauty,” Kingston Daily Freeman (October 26, 1909), 5. Among other actions, the landscape engineers created a macadam roadway around and through the entire reservoir and converted a thousand-foot strip of land into a park.

13 Tad Wise, “Zulma Steele: Gender Bender Extraordinaire,” Woodstock Times (August 30, 1918), 8. In his article Wise suggests that the founder of the Byrdcliffe art colony Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead may have assisted Steele in getting around the mountains to work on her paintings by chauffeuring her in his town car.

14 West Hurley Clearing—Ashokan Reservoir may be the similarly titled Across Cleared Land or Cleared Lands of the Ashokan Reservoir. Over the course of the 1930s, the Woodstock artist Arnold Wiltz created paintings, wood engravings, and lithographs of the reservoir’s spillway and causeway.

15 Steele regularly exhibited at the Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, which was a pioneering forum for women artists to exhibit and promote their work, and for the general advancement of women in the arts.

16 “Brooklyn Artists in Excellent Exhibit,” The Brooklyn Eagle (April 8, 1915), 23.

17 In the fall of 1912, the MacDowell Club, which had spacious rooms and a large vaulted gallery on West 55th Street, inaugurated a program of group exhibitions numbering between eight and twelve participating artists. The exhibitors served as their own jury, their intention being to make the space an open field for the expression of the various movements of old art or new, and to provide an opportunity for many talented but previously unrecognized artists to show their work. Among these were Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. For a discussion of the inauguration of the MacDowell’s group exhibition, see “An Exhibition Without a Jury System of Awards,” The New York Times (May 14, 1912), 138.

18 “The World of Art,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (February 20, 1915), 14.

19 “Canvases by Miss Zulma Steele,” Brooklyn Life (March 20, 1915), 21.

20 “Brooklyn Women Prominent in Painters and Sculptors’ Exhibit,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (November 24, 1915), 24.

21 “An Appreciation,” Baltimore Sun (January 19, 1918), 8. A fragment of a worn and otherwise indecipherable exhibition label on the reverse of Picnic, Ashokan Reservoir, New York reveals that Ashokan Reservoir, New York was used as an alternative title. It is possible that Picnic, Ashokan Reservoir, New York is the work that was on exhibition in Chicago, Baltimore and, later, at the Arnot Art Gallery.

22 “Arnot Art Gallery,” Elmira Star-Gazette (January 23, 1918), 9.

23 Steele’s name is listed as a student in the Department of Fine Art in School of the Museum of Fine Arts Thirty-third Annual Report for the Year Ending June 1, 1909 (Boston: Museum School, 1909), 21. Tarbell and Benson were listed as the painting instructors. A copy of this publication can be found at: https://books.google.com/books?id=R7tGAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA19-PA1&lpg=RA19-PA1&dq

24 Birge Harrison, “The Woodstock School of Landscape Painting,” Art and Progress 1 (September 1910), 319.

25 Steele’s attendance at the Armory Show is noted in Tad Wise, 8.

26 Grace Gueck, “Zulma Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow,” The New York Times (March 25, 2005), section 3, 31.

27 Art historian Tom Wolf has remarked that Woodstock in the teens “saw the rise of a distinctive and colorful style of landscape painting. Local scenes were rendered with thick strokes of bright color in a manner somewhere between a broadened Impressionism and tamed Fauvism.” Tom Wolf, “Historical Survey,” essay in Woodstock’s Art Heritage: The Permanent Collection of the Woodstock Artists Association (Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1987), 21.

28 The National Arts Club exhibition included artists working in wide variety of styles, which ranged, as one critic noted, from the “very wildest of the futurists” to the “solid and enduring [work of the realists] George Luks and Jerome Myers.” “What is Happening in the World of Art,” New York Sun (February 8, 1914), 7th section, 2.

29 Carol Lowery, Zulma Steele and Arthur Wesley Dow (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2005), n.p.

30 During his first three years at Byrdcliffe, Schumacher had solo exhibitions at the Daniel Gallery in New York, one of the city’s leading spaces for showing modern American art. 31 Schumacher returned to America in the summer of 1912. During early 1913, he lived in Chicago, where he may have been in contact with Hull House. The pioneering settlement house was the source of various teachers, artists, and visitors to Byrdcliffe. The photographer Eva Watson-Schutze split time in Chicago (where she was involved with Hull House) and Byrdcliffe, and she may have played a role in Schumacher’s coming to teach there. She later credited Schumacher’s teaching in Byrdcliffe for reawakening her “desire to find expression through form, color and design based on a visible and living world.” Watson-Schutze is quoted in Jean F. Block, Eva Watson Schutze: Photo-Secessionist (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1985), 14. Among Schumacher’s other students at Byrdliffe were the painter, printmaker and designer Blanche Lazzell, who learned color theory under Schumacher’s aegis, and is best remembered for the colorful Cubist-inspired woodcuts she created in Provinctown, and Norman T. Boggs, Jr., who studied with him in the early 1930s. For further information about Schumacher, see “Schumacher Gives First Exhibition at Woman’s Cosmopolitan Club,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (January 19, 1913), 8; Lucille E. Morehouse, “Oh What a What,” Indianapolis Star (April 30, 1913), 30; Flo Field, “Mr. William Emile Schumacher, American Post Impressionist,” New Orleans Times (February 23, 1913), 32; and “Ferargil Galleries,” New York Evening-Post (October 29, 1932), 8.

32 The quote appears in “The Tao of Arthur Wesley Dow,” on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. See https:// arts.mia.org/stories/the-tao-of-arthur-wesley-dow/.

33 Dow is quoted in Frederick C. Moffatt, Arthur Wesley Dow (1857-1922) (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1977), 59

34 Arthur Wesley Dow, “Foreword,” The Color of the Grand Canyon of Arizona, Exhibition of Pictures by Arthur Wesley Dow (New York: Montross Gallery, 1913), n.p. Steele also had the opportunity to see one of Dow’s large paintings of the Grand Canyon at the Special Loan Exhibition of Contemporary Art held at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn in November 1914, where she also had works on view. “Plymouth Church Will Show its Art,” Brooklyn Standard Union (November 7, 1914), 2.

35 For a brief account of Steele’s time in France in 1918 and 1919, see Margaret Ruff, “Zulma Steele Combines Painting and Genealogy,” Catskill Mountain Star (February 19, 1954), p. 3.

36 “New York,” The Modern Hospital 19 (September 1922): 254.

Selected Works

Family and Background

Photographer unknown

Zulma Steele around age 20, c. 1901.

Photograph, 6¾ x 4¾ inches.

Collection of Janet Marsh Hunt.

Photographer unknown

Zulma Steele in France during World War I c. 1917.

Photograph, 7⅜ x 4¾ inches.

Collection of Janet Marsh Hunt.

Photographer unknown book, 8¼ x 11 inches. Collection of Henry T. Ford and Michael G. Knauth.

Zulma Steele at the potter’s wheel, n.d.

Photograph, 4¼ x 3 inches.

Collection of Janet Marsh Hunt.

Zulma DeLacy Steele Untitled (Landscape with river), n.d. Watercolor, 23 x 27 inches. Collection of Henry T. Ford and Michael G. Knauth.

Furniture and Furniture Design

Zulma Steele

Drop-Front Desk with Iris Panels

(promotional drawing of finished desk), 1904.

Graphite and colored pencil on paper, 9 x 6¾ inches.

Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Alf Evers Collection, Gift of the Douglas C. James Charitable Trust.

Zulma Steele

Maple Leaf Sideboard, 1904. Ink, 7½ x 8½ inches.

Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Gift of the Douglas C. James Charitable Trust.

Zulma Steele and unknown carver Drop-Front Desk with Iris Panels, 1904. Cherry wood and paint, 50⅜ x 38⅜ x 16 inches. Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Gift of Elise Glenne and the Douglas C. James Charitable Trust.

Painting

Untitled (Landscape with evergreen) c. 1910–1912.

Untitled (Landscape with mountains) c. 1910–1912.

on canvas, 12 x 14 inches.