John Ottis Adams (July 8, 1851 – January 28, 1927) was an American impressionist painter and art educator who is best known as a advocate of the Hoosier Group of Indiana landscape painters, along similar to William Forsyth, Richard B. Gruelle, Otto Stark, and T. C. Steele. In addition, Adams was among a help that formed the Society of Western Artists in 1896, and served as the organization’s president in 1908 and 1909.
Adams grew taking place in central Indiana, but usual his formal art training at the South Kensington School of Art in London. He spent seven years in Germany, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Adams formed the Muncie Art School with Forsyth, but the college closed after two years. Adams plus assisted in planning and taught art classes at the John Herron Art Institute, which forward-looking became the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. He as well as gave informal art lessons at the Hermitage, his house and studio near Brookville, Indiana. In 2004 the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places; it is then a contributing property to the Brookville Historic District.
Several major exhibitions have included Adams’s work: Five Hoosier Painters in Chicago, Illinois, in 1894; the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World’s Fair) in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1904; the Panama–Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, California, in 1915; and the first Hoosier Salon in Chicago in 1925. In 1910 Adams exhibited internationally at the Buenos Aires Exposition in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Santiago, Chile, where one of his paintings, A Frosty Morning, received an trustworthy mention. Adams won several other prizes for his art. Iridescence of a Shallow Stream won a bronze medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (the 1904 World’s Fair) and A Winter Morning won the $500 Fine Arts Building Prize at the Society of Western Artists exhibition in Chicago in 1907. Adams’s produce a result is represented in the collections of several Indiana civic and cultural institutions.
Today his paintings are held in a number of private collections and museums, including the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art.
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