In 1914, the St. Margaret’s Hospital Guild, a women’s society that supplemented public funding to Eskenazi Health, known as City Hospital at the time, provided money to beautify the facility’s first modern wards that were constructed with a bequest of Indianapolis businessperson Alfred Burdsal. Dr. T. Victor Keene, president of the Indiana Board of Health, worked with Forsyth, Stark, Steele, and 13 other Indiana artists to create large-scale murals to cover the Burdsal Units’ interior walls.
Forsyth managed the project and selected the color scheme. All artists, apart from J. Ottis Adams, Wayman Adams, and T. C. Steele, who painted in their own studios, worked onsite. Some of the artists even moved into the building temporarily to defray their own costs. Each of them painted on canvas. When complete, the murals were glued to the walls of the hospital building.
The project was unprecedented and resulted in an estimated quarter mile of artwork. Forsyth named it “the most ambitious and monumental work yet undertaken by Indiana artists.”
Below is a sampling of some of the works for the City Hospital project. Click on a painting to view a larger version.