By Doug Miller
The cause was cancer, her husband Daniel said.
Steele's work included large oil portraits of each of her seven children, plus various scenes from her childhood and landscapes from the several countries and cities she lived in as an Army wife. Her most important piece, "Madonna Della Cascata," was blessed by Pope John Paul II in 1983.
She fully recognized the significance of her home in the context of Long Beach's history, and made it available to the Long Beach Historical Society and the Long Beach Island Landmark Association for its fund-raising house tours. She was a member at various times of every local artists guild, including the Long Beach Bohemians and West End Artists.
"She was warm and generous," said Carrole Anne Geraci, president of the Long Beach Historical Society. "She opened her home to everyone and took such pride in what she created, there in Senator Reynolds's house. And she could create anything. She had such clever hands."
The history of the house is as rich as the city's. Historians believe it was the house Reynolds designed for his own use and lived in once the city was up and running. The property extends from Pine Street to West Bay Drive, and the bay windows in the sitting room, which Clara designed, look out over Reynolds Channel. The home was gutted in a fire in the 1970s, and the Steeles bought what was then a shell in 1976 for a price that would today get you a modest new car. She spent the next 30 years restoring it.
The main sitting room downstairs is adorned with large paintings of hers under a fresco-ed ceiling of carved angels. All the way up the winding stairway the walls are filled with scenes she painted from her memories of her various homes in Italy, Germany, various American cities and Nigeria, where Dan worked after he retired.
The upstairs hall is lined with portraits of her seven children, Charles, Robert, Daniel Jr. (who predeceased her), Margherita, Isabella, Alexander and Preziosa. None of the children grew up to be artists, Daniel said. "She was unique."
That hallway leads to a small chapel, done in beads and a sculpted Madonna and Christ of her own hand.
The master bedroom's domed ceiling is decorated with the faces of 16 of her 20 grandchildren atop angels' bodies. The grandchildren ultimately came faster than she could paint them, Daniel explained.
And the last bedroom, across from the master bedroom, remained incomplete. It has a cathedral ceiling and overlooks the bay, but Clara had only finally decided what to do with it, Dan said. The basement workshop is remains full of the moldings she had prepared, but nobody was sure what her exact vision for the room was.
Her method of working was almost by the seat of her pants, without blueprints, Dan said. "I told her to make a drawing of how it should look, so I could help," he said. "She kept saying 'But I don't know what I want yet'."
Her wake was held in the house last weekend, with her body laying in state. "She was an incredibly spiritual person," said Roberta Fiore, the city's historian. "I went to the wake and her body lay in her chapel upstairs. The door to the bedroom was open, and in the bedroom was the scaffold and the bench. To me it was very spiritual, to see her and to think she was near the last place where she sat and worked."
Born Clara Antonucci in Erpelle Cosina, Slovenia, which then was part of Italy, she was 14 when she visited a local carnival in Trieste that would change her life. It was 1947 and the war was newly over and she met a handsome young serviceman, 18-year-old Daniel Steele of an essentially nameless part of western Nebraska, and they fell in love. They courted, always under strict chaperone, for two years before the young G.I. was confronted by her mother.
"Do you love her?" she demanded.
Very much, he said.
"Then when will you marry her?"
"April," he found himself saying, and she took him to buy a ring. "And I guess I was engaged," he said.
True to his word, on April 28, 1949, they married. She was 16 years old. Except for two of the eight years he worked in Nigeria, they were never apart.
"It's been a blessed life," he said.
Comments about this story? DMiller@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.
