Oil Paintings by Jean Crawford Adams, June 2-July 1, 1931

Jean Crawford Adams was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1886. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago under John Vanderpoel and George Bellows. Around 1920, she attended the Provincetown School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibition in 1915 and in 1925 won a prize in the museum’s “Chicago and Vicinity” show.

She traveled to Europe and the British isles for two years making oils, watercolors, and woodcuts. In Paris, she studied with Andrew Lhote at his art school founded in 1922. Adams returned to Chicago by 1928 and exhibited at the No-Jury Society of Artists that year. She also exhibited several landscape paintings at the Woman’s World Fair at Chicago’s Coliseum.

In 1930, the Art Institute’s “Room of Chicago Art” displayed twenty-eight paintings by Adams. It was this selection that was this exhibition at the Legion of Honor in 1931; it also went to the Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

In Chicago she belonged to a circle of modernist artists that also included Frances Foy and Laura van Pappelendam. They joined with others in 1929 to form The Ten, or 10 Artists (Chicago), holding annual exhibitions at the Marshall Field and Company department store until the early 1940s. She was represented in the Whitney Museum's survey “Exhibition of Paintings and Prints by Chicago Artists” in 1933, the Art Institute’s Century of Progress loan exhibition the same year, and the Art Institute’s 1939-1940 survey “Half a Century of American Art.”

Still-life images and landscapes dominated Adams’s subject matter. She painted pastoral Midwestern scenes, views of Provincetown, picturesque settings in France, and images of the Rocky Mountains and of scenery near Santa Fe. Adams remains particularly known for her paintings of Chicago, however. The artist died in 1972 at the age of 86.

Sources:
Greenhouse, Wendy. “Jean Crawford Adams 1886–1972.” M. Christine Schwartz Collection. Accessed May 3, 2022. https://schwartzcollection.com/artist/jean-crawford-adams/.
“Jean Crawford Adams.” Jean Crawford Adams (American, 1884 - 1972) - Richard Norton Gallery. Accessed May 3, 2022. https://richardnortongallery.com/artists/jean-crawford-adams.