Marie’s self-portrait and her portrait of “Cari,” both in middle age.

Marie Goth was a woman ahead of her time. She was a portrait painter in the early 20th century when men traditionally dominated that vocation. Moreover, she was a portrait painter in Brown County, where the other members of the legendary art colony were rural landscape artists.
While she may not have been the most famous painter in the colony, anyone in Indiana with an interest in art has heard or read about this unusual woman whose pioneering professional success and eccentric lifestyle—especially her ambiguous personal relationship with artist Varaldo Guiseppe Cariani—were fodder for gossip throughout her adult life.
Her portrait studio, a cabin north of Nashville, Indiana, became a magnet for people from all walks of life during the heyday of the Brown County Art Colony, considered one the most important regional art colonies in the United States. During her long career she painted such luminaries as General Douglas MacArthur, movie czar Will Hays, Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley, and three of Indiana’s governors. Her expressive portraits hang throughout the United States.
Known locally for her eccentricities and frugality as well as her paintings, the dark-eyed Marie often wore hand-me-down clothes, served ice water and stale popcorn to visitors, and was loath to discard anything. A reporter for The Indianapolis Star wrote that when she served tea to the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra conductor, who was sitting for a portrait, the cups were cracked and the sugar bowl had a broken handle. And to this day speculation swirls around her relationship with Cariani. Living in adjacent cabins for decades, the couple’s mutual devotion was obvious to all who knew them. Yet they never married.
Marie made her daring choice to paint portrait commissions while attending the Art Students League in New York, where she studied for ten years with the well-known portrait artist Frank Vincent DuMond. Once her mind was made up, she never wavered from her ambition to be a first-rate portrait artist. Raised in an Indianapolis household of musicians—her father was a bass violinist for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and her mother a talented contralto—Marie learned piano as a youngster and briefly considered a career in music. “I wanted to pursue the piano by taking advanced instruction at Indiana University, but art is a jealous master and will not permit you to do anything else,” she wrote.
In New York, Marie painted small portraits while living at the Three Arts Club. “When a portrait was finished,” she wrote in an unpublished autobiography, “I would exhibit it briefly at the entrance of the Club dining room, and this was advertisement enough to help me with my expenses. My price was $15.”

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