CHARLES PARTRIDGE ADAMS (1858 -1942)
Mount Princeton (4, 327 m- 14, 2014ft)
United States of America (Colorado)
In Mount Princeton in 1895, watercolor
The mountain Mount Princeton (4, 327 m- 14, 2014ft) also known as Clak Peak or Princeton Mountain is a high and prominent mountain summit of the Collegiate Peaks in the Sawatch Range of the Rocky Mountains of North America. This fourteener is located in San Isabel National Forest, 7.8 miles (12.6 km) southwest (bearing 225°) of the Town of Buena Vista in Chaffee County, Colorado, United States. The mountain was named in honor of Princeton University.[
While not one of the highest peaks of the Sawatch Range, Mount Princeton is one of the most dramatic, abruptly rising nearly 7,000 feet above the Arkansas River valley in only 6 miles.
The first recorded ascent was on July 17, 1877, at 12:30 pm by William Libbey of Princeton University. It is likely that various miners had climbed the peak earlier. The name Mount Princeton was in use as early as 1873, and the peak was most likely named by Henry Gannett, a Harvard graduate and chief topographer in a government survey led by George M. Wheeler.
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.
In 1877 he began work in the Chain and Hardy bookstore in Denver, and received lessons from Helen Henderson Chain, an artist who had studied with George Inness. In 1885 he traveled to the East Coast and visited the studios of George Inness and Worthington Whittredge, and in 1888 he traveled to California and visited the studios of William Keith and Thomas Hill. He traveled to Louisiana in 1890, and to Europe in the summer of 1914. He spent the winter of 1916 in California, and moved to Los Angeles in 1920, and built a second home in Laguna Beach in 1926.
Adams is known for his 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.
Most of Adams paintings are enhanced by the use of stronger colors than one would find in a photograph. The evening shadows are bluer, the spring grass is greener, the sunsets more strikingly yellow or orange. He sometimes used very small areas of intense blue and red to enliven a dark shadowed area such as the heart of a clump of willows or the dark base of an aspen tree. He also made the mountains look about twice as tall as they actually look, as if seen through a telephoto lens.
Some of his earlier paintings include animals or human figures, but 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. Over 950 paintings have been documented.
