Nashville Artists Colony

In the first years of the twentieth century, painters seeking scenery began finding their way to Brown County, drawn by its rolling, densely wooded hills and the soft, changeable light over them. The landscape reminded some of the Smoky Mountains, and the painter T.C. Steele's move to the area in 1907 helped anchor a growing community of artists.

Over the following decades a genuine art colony took shape around Nashville, with painters living, working, and teaching in the hills. Brown County became known nationally for its landscape painting, and the town filled with the studios and galleries that still define it, making it one of the enduring art colonies of the American heartland.

Modern Nashville keeps the colony alive as a village given over almost entirely to art and craft. Its streets are lined with galleries showing painting and sculpture, working studios where artists can be seen at their craft, and shops selling pottery, glass, textiles, and other handmade goods.

The result is a place where art is not preserved behind glass but made and sold in real time, a rare survival of the colony spirit. Visitors can spend a day drifting from gallery to studio, and many artists still draw, as their predecessors did, on the hills all around.

The setting is inseparable from the art. Brown County's steep, forested hills and deep hollows create the layered ridgelines and shifting light that first pulled painters here, and the surrounding state park and forest protect much of that landscape. In autumn the hardwood forests turn brilliant, and the county becomes one of the Midwest's great fall-color destinations.

This hill country is old homeland of the Miami and Shawnee peoples among the Native nations of southern Indiana, who lived and hunted in these forests before treaties and forced removals in the early nineteenth century. The wild, scenic land the painters celebrated was a Native landscape long before it was a subject for canvas.

Nashville is best explored on foot, wandering its hilly streets from gallery to studio to shop, though comfortable shoes help with the grades. Autumn is the peak season, when the color draws large crowds and the town is at its liveliest, while spring and summer offer a quieter visit.

A trip here pairs naturally with the nearby T.C. Steele home, where the painter lived and worked, and with Brown County State Park for a walk through the hills that inspired the whole colony. Together they tell the full story of why art took root in this corner of Indiana.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.