Charles Partridge Adams - The Art

The Art

Adams is widely considered to have been Colorado’s finest landscape artist. He is best known for his stunning views of snowy mountain peaks in early morning or sunset light, or wreathed in storm clouds, and for his luminous sunset and twilight paintings of the river bottoms near Denver. His works show an intensely personal and poetic response to the Colorado mountains and plains, with unusual sensitivity to the changing effects of light, atmosphere and season.

Adams early work in the 1880s was largely representational and somewhat prosaic, with only hints of the more impressionist works to follow. His style began to coalesce in the early 1890s with some excellent luminous sunsets, some of which were in a Barbizon style, but overall his output was still uneven. In the later 1890s his painting became much more consistent, impressionist, and colorful, and this style prevailed through about 1915. After that his style became progressively “looser,” with larger brush strokes, brighter colors, more impasto, and much less attention to foreground and detail. Some paintings left at his death show only traces of his previous skill.

His mature style is best characterized as broad, impressionistic and subjective. Adams experimented freely with different palettes and lighting, and some of these were much more successful than others. He must have created several hundred paintings of Longs and Meeker Peaks from his studio in Estes Park, Colorado, yet no two are alike, and some are strikingly different.

A hallmark of Adams’ paintings was his ability to capture very fleeting lighting: the soft first pink light of alpenglow sunrise on snow-capped peaks, the colors of sunset seen through cottonwood trees, the effect of the sun shining through swiftly changing storm clouds or a summer shower. Although this lighting usually lasts for only a few minutes at most, he was able to catch it and preserve it.

All art enhances aspects of its subject matter, and de-emphasizes others. Most of Adams paintings are enhanced primarily by the use of stronger colors than one would actually find in a photograph. The evening shadows are bluer, the spring grass is greener, the sunsets more strikingly yellow or orange—and occasionally he went too far, becoming garish. He sometimes used very small areas of intense blue and red to enliven a dark shadowed area such as the heart of a clump of willows or the dark base of an aspen tree. He also made the mountains look about twice as tall as they actually look, as if seen through a telephoto lens.

Some of his earlier paintings include animals or human figures, but he was not very successful at rendering these, and later paintings do not include them.

Roughly half of Adams paintings are oils and half are watercolors, which he began painting in the early 1890s. Although some of his watercolors are masterfully detailed and very carefully done, others are much less detailed, and must have been done very quickly for the tourist trade. As one watercolorist remarked about one of these, “That one must have taken him all of 15 minutes.” Over 950 paintings have been documented. His total output is unknown, but it is estimated to have been 3,000 or more.