Jean Crawford Adams
American, 1884 - 1972Illinois Farm, ca. 1930
Not on view
Oil on board
Dimensions18 × 24 in. (45.7 × 61 cm)
Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, Inlander Collection, L2003.34
This painting depicts a farm and plowed fields in northern Illinois.
Jean Crawford Adams was born in Chicago in l884. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Adams lived and worked in Chicago all of her life, although she did travel frequently in the United States and abroad. She was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists and another group of Chicago artists known as the Ten. Adams is recognized as one of the first generation of Chicago painters to embrace Post-Impressionism.
In the 1920s, Adam’s work became bold and graphic, with a color palette similar to the Fauvists. Building her images from patterns of unblended paint strokes, Adams created a personal style of expression that uniquely enriched American Scene painting in the Great Lakes region. The subjects Adams favored in her art reflect her life in the urban Midwest. She is best known for her depiction of Chicago and its distinctive architecture. Her fascination with place, however, also led her to paint numerous landscape views of rural Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. She once stated that she sought to identify and artistically transform "the currents of power which may be spiritualized and transmuted into art."
