(back to top)

(back to top)

Adams' skillful drawing technique is visible in the careful balance of horizontals and verticals.

This sunlit canvas is brighter than the dark scenarios preferred by the Royal Academy in Munich, where Adams studied in the 1880s.

Wash Day, painted in Munich, is the first work Adams sent to America for exhibition.

(back to top)

John Ottis Adams

Wash Day, Bavaria. 1885

oil on canvas

18 ½ x 23 ¼ inches

Gift of Robert Brady Adams, John Alban Adams and Edward W. Adams

Learn More

J. Ottis Adams was born in Amity, Indiana and settled with his family in Shelbyville, Indiana.  The young Adams was fascinated with art and spent much of his time drawing. He enrolled in Wabash College but left a year later to study art at the South Kensington School in London where he came under the influence of John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner, whose landscapes were of particular interest to Adams.  He returned to Indiana and settled in Muncie.  In 1880, Adams traveled to Munich to study at the Royal Academy with fellow Indiana artists Theodore Clement Steele and Samuel Richards.  Adams studied drawing and painting at the Academy and then set up his own studio in Munich.  When he returned to Indiana in 1887, Adams set up a studio in Muncie and began teaching art classes.  In 1889, he and fellow artist William Forsyth opened the Muncie Art School, which lasted two years. Adams participated in a group show of Hoosier artists that traveled from Indianapolis to Chicago.  A critic dubbed the artists in the exhibition The Hoosier Group.  Two years later, Adams, Forsyth and Steele along with other artists in the area, formed the Society of Western Artists, the first organization dedicated to promoting the work of the region’s artists.  In 1898, Adams and T. C. Steele purchased a house in Brookville, Indiana later known as the Hermitage.  In 1901, Adams became one of the first teachers at the newly built John Herron Art Institute where he taught from 1902 to 1906. During the latter part of his life, Adams worked in Florida and Michigan as well as Brookville.    

Shown in New York in 1886, Wash Day, Bavaria is the first painting Adams sent to America for exhibition.  It is surprising the artist would have chosen this kind of landscape for his debut, since he primarily exhibited genre subjects of peasants working in the fields.   There the diagonal lines of the grass and clothesline draw the viewer to the woman hanging her laundry.  Although the forms are solidly rendered in the academic tradition, this sunlit canvas is brighter and richer in tonality than the dark scenarios preferred by the Royal Academy.  Adams always favored Wash Day, Bavaria and hung it in a place of prominence in his studio when he returned to Muncie.

Reference

Wilbur David Peat. Pioneer Painters of Indiana, Indianapolis: Art Association of Indianapolis, Indiana, 1954.  ASIN: B0007DFBR2