See the Colorado artist's works as part of the exhibit "Learning to See Color" at the University of Denver's Vicki Myhren Gallery through March 6.
Unlike Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and other landscape painters who were just passing through, Charles Partridge Adams called Colorado home. “He gathered an intimate knowledge of the state and had a deep emotional connection to it,” says Thomas Smith, director of the Petrie Institute of Western American Art at the Denver Art Museum.
Widely considered Colorado’s finest landscape artist, the largely self-taught Adams moved at age 18 with his family from Massachusetts to Denver in an effort to cure his two sisters of tuberculosis. Soon after, Adams went to work at a bookstore, where he received his first (and only) art training from the owner’s wife, Helen Chain, who had studied with George Inness.
Once established, Adams would make his living selling oils to wealthy clients and watercolors to tourists, painting during summers out of a mountain studio in Estes Park he called The Sketch Box. Serious illness prompted him to relocate to California, where coastal scenes proved more popular than the Colorado landscapes he continued to paint from memory.
Having evolved from tight realism to “something a little more poetic, focusing on tonalism, atmosphere, and light,” Smith says, “[Adams] finally developed his own brand of impressionism with a striking emphasis on color and the layering of paint,” culminating a career that first and foremost celebrated the spirit of the mountains.
Learning to See Color will be at the University of Denver's Vicki Myhren Gallery through March 6, 2016. The show pairs well-known figures in the university's art collections with contemporary artists who explore color in their works. In addition to Charles Partridge Adams, the exhibit features the works of Josef Albers, Carmon Colangelo, Renluka Maharaj, Robert Rauschenberg, Mario Reis, Norman Rockwell, and Sandy Skoglund. To accompany the exhibit, on February 25 the Colorado Symphony will be joined by DU graduate students Bailey Dunning and Travis Powell, who are pursuing degrees in the Emergent Digital Practices Program of the School of Art. They will give a live performance of light and color choreographed with the music.
