CHARLES PARTRIDGE ADAMS (1858–1942)
Arapaho Peak (4,117m- 13, 508ft)
United States of America (Colorado)
In Arapaho Peaks, 1905, oil on canvas,
The mountain
When geographical maps refer to Arapaho Peak(4,117 m- 13,508-ft) they refer in reality to North Arapaho Peak , one of the two Arapho peaks (North and South). North Arapho peak is the highest summit of the Indian Peaks in the northern Front Range of the Rocky Mountains of North America. The thirteener is located in the Indian Peaks Wilderness, 7.8 miles (12.6 km) west-southwest (bearing 245°) of the Town of Ward, Colorado, United States, on the Continental Divide separating Roosevelt National Forest and Boulder County from Arapaho National Forest and Grand County.Between North Arapaho Peak and neighboring South Arapaho Peak sits Arapaho Glacier, which is owned by the City of Boulder as part of its water supply. West of these peaks is Arapaho Pass.
The Colorado Indian Peaks Wilderness is home to many of the best hiking and climbing routes in the state. All 73,391 acres of The Indian Peak Wilderness rests just south of Rocky Mountain National Park; it's basically an extension of its neighboring national park. As Gerry Roach notes in his popular book "It's smaller than Rocky Mountain National Park but no less spectacular." This impressive collection of jagged peaks includes 35 named peaks, 23 of which are over 12,000 ft, while seven are over 13,000 ft. From easy walk-ups to technical 5.5 climbing this mountaineering playground has something for everybody. Only 2 hours from Denver, the IPW can be a popular place for the day hiker, but solitude can be had by those willing to look for it.
The painter
Charles Partridge Adams was a largely self-taught American landscape artist who painted primarily in Colorado, and secondarily in California. Some paintings were also made in other Rocky Mountain states, the Pacific Northwest and Canada, and a few in Louisiana, the East Coast and Europe.
Adams is widely considered to have been Colorado’s finest landscape artist. He is best known for his stunning views of snowy mountain peaks in early morning or sunset light, or wreathed in storm clouds, and for his luminous sunset and twilight paintings of the river bottoms near Denver. His works show an intensely personal and poetic response to the Colorado mountains and plains, with unusual sensitivity to the changing effects of light, atmosphere and season.
Adams early work in the 1880s was largely representational and somewhat prosaic, with only hints of the more impressionist works to follow. His style began to coalesce in the early 1890s with some excellent luminous sunsets, some of which were in a Barbizon style, but overall his output was still uneven. In the later 1890s his painting became much more consistent, impressionist, and colorful, and this style prevailed through about 1915. After that his style became progressively “looser,” with larger brush strokes, brighter colors, more impasto, and much less attention to foreground and detail. Some paintings left at his death show only traces of his previous skill.
Adams experimented freely with different palettes and lighting, and some of these were much more successful than others. He must have created several hundred paintings of Longs and Meeker Peaks from his studio in Estes Park, Colorado, yet no two are alike, and some are strikingly different.
Some of his earlier paintings include animals or human figures, but he was not very successful at rendering these, and later paintings do not include them.
Roughly half of Adams paintings are oils and half are watercolors, which he began painting in the early 1890s. Although some of his watercolors are masterfully detailed and very carefully done, others are much less detailed, and must have been done very quickly for the tourist trade. As one watercolorist remarked about one of these, “That one must have taken him all of 15 minutes.” Over 950 paintings have been documented. His total output is unknown, but it is estimated to have been 3,000 or more.