FROM the time he set up his first studio in Indianapolis some twenty years ago, Wayman Adams has been painting

American portraits with distinguished grace and candour. Since 1918 he has lived in New York, though he has

spent some time abroad. As a student he travel1ed and painted in Spain with Henri and in Italy with Chase.

He reads American character with sympathetic insight.

Though primarily a portrait painter, Mr. Adams has done many crisp and revealing lithographs of southern Negroes.                               No artist has caught so deftly the lazy slackness, the strutting self-importance and the droll sentimentality of these coloured types.          

Boven: Booth Tarkington, Amerikaans schrijver – rechts: Snig, zijn zoon

He has a nice combination of intellectual penetration and emotional fervour. One understands from

his work that portrait painting is an exciting occupation for him and so it becomes exciting for the

spectator. His people belong in the particular setting in which he conceives them. Some of his Indiana

subjects actually bring to mind concrete images from their milieu of Middle-West streets and courthouses

and small town dignity.

In his earlier as well as later work he has shown a broad and selective simplicity, an understanding

of the complex problems which effective simplicity involves. A portrait of Professor Alexander Ernestinoff.

done in 1914. is a suave and yet forceful painting. the hands and face sensitively and vigorously modelled

and set off perfectly by the black hat and the masses of overcoat in rich dark swirls. A portrait of

John Mc Clure Hamilton in overcoat. top hat and gloves is similarly successful. with a terse statement

of character permeating every detail of the face and figure.

An Adams portrait conspicuously hung in the Vanderbilt Gallery has enlivened more than one stuffy

National Academy exhibition. There was not a dull moment in the one-man show that Mr. Adams put on

at the Fifty-Sixth Street Galleries a year or two ago. From it the spectator received a fresh and

stirring impression of the interest and diversity of our national character and life.

And the exhibit represented only a small selection from the artist' s brilliant and imposing output.

Onder: “Ella, Wayman Jr, en rechts Naomi Priscilla – olie op canvas (1925)

Colonel E. M. House, Agnes Repplier, Vice-President Fairbanks, Pop Hart, Professor Edward Lee Thorndike,

Horatio Walker, John H. Macfadden, Leopold Auer, Prince Antoine Bibesco, Alice Longworth, Irving R. Wiles,

Robert Underwood Johnson, Lillian Genth, Booth Tarkington, Bishop Thomas F. Gailor, are a few of

the outstanding personages on a long list painted with admirable penetration and deft comment.

Of several portraits of Joseph Pennell, one of the etcher working over his plates (reproduced in

THE STUDIO for April 1933 on p. 277) is especially crisp and vital, with fascinating spontaneity and completeness.

Mr. Adams was commissioned by the National Academy of Design to paint President Hoover. A portrait

of Calvin Coolidge reflects precisely the inherent restraint of the figure and the tight, Yankee reticence of the face,

an excellent likeness of a poised, self-contained individual of New England ancestry and taste.

Mr. Adams is not too much given to stage accessories, and when he does choose a piece of supporting

property it is sure to be very right. The small square picture and white mantel in Agnes Repplier's portrait,

for instance, accentuate the delicate austerity of her face and figure, and a Chinese statuette complements

the lightly theatrical quality of a portrait of Oliver Sayler.

Mr. Adams paints two or more people together with great freedom and reality, with a sensitive feeling for

composition and uncanny facility for reflecting the particular rapport of a related group. His painting of three men,

called The Conspiracy, is one of his best-known portrait groups. The men are Joseph Pennell and his two friends,

Charles Burns and John McClure Hamilton and they are presented with captivating extemporaneousness and

a refined and genial humour. The Art Jury is another group which is similarly casual and effective.

     Though often spoken of as a painter of men, Wayman Adams paints women with equal discernment and taste,

as his recent portrait of Mrs. Blasser indicates. He paints children, including infants, with iridescent sensibility and grace.

Snig, his young son, painted as a tiny baby with a nursing bottle, is a singularly successful treatment of an extremely

difficult subject. Little Miss Texas, with a basket of flowers on her arm, is a joyously colourful portrait with the

fragile aliveness of a vivacious child of two or three years. Karen is big-eyed and elfin and Joyce has the soft

indefiniteness of the very young. Marguerite and Buster provide one of the artist's revelations of the exquisite

gravity of childhood. Mrs. Will Clayton's portrait is vivid and natural. Mrs. Alexander Cameron, an elderly woman

wearing a scarlet shawl and seated beside a silver tea service, is a distinguished portrait, excellently

conceived and executed and suggesting the transparent frailty and the spiritual gallantry of age.

In such a canvas as his Negro nude, called The Sphinx, which was exhibited at a recent academy show,

Mr. Adams indulges a fondness for cool, sculptured forms and luscious textures and surfaces.

Of similar inspiration is his Madonna on the Ass  in softly luminous blues. While he paints expression so discerningly,

The Sphinx shows that he can paint the lack of it as well. The face and figure are as un- revealing as the

solid wall behind them. And balancing this profundity of reserve is the lusciousness of a crushed rose in an opalescent

porcelain vase.

tension which keeps a reassuring balance. And his economy never seems frugal. At times his technique

 is very free and broad, and at other times quite finished and formal.

As one would infer from the portraits, Wayman Adams works with great rapidity, catching aptly

the fleeting moments by which a sitter reveals himself. Sometimes he does " stunt painting "

before an audience, racing over his canvas with bold, dramatic strokes.

And usually he gets a good likeness, a really decent portrait, in an hour and a half of this rapid work.

The stunt painting has proved so entertaining and instructive that Mr. Adams has been filmed in action

by a moving picture company.

He has exhibited extensively both here and abroad and has won an