John Henry Adams, Jr.

John Henry Adams, Jr. (21 Aug. 1878 - 5 Sept. 1948), artist, was born in Colquitt County, Georgia, son of John Henry Adams, a former slave and preacher in the Methodist Church, and Mittie Rouse. Many questions surround Adams’s early life. While he reported in an Atlanta Constitution article (23 June 1902) that he came from a humble background, his father served parishes throughout Georgia. According to History of the American Negro and his Institutions (1917), Adams Sr. was a man of accomplishment, leading black Georgians in a colony in Liberia for two years and receiving two honorary doctorates, from Bethany College and Morris Brown University. Educated in Atlanta schools, Adams claimed in the Atlanta Constitution article to have traveled to Philadelphia in the late 1890s to take art classes at Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry (later Drexel University). Drexel, established in 1891, opened its doors to a diverse student body. Even though the school’s records do not show Adams’s enrollment, it is likely that Adams reported the truth when he stated that he had studied under Howard Pyle, the famed illustrator and teacher who inspired a generation of American illustrators and who at that time an instructor at Drexel. While the composition of Adams’s drawings may have been inspired by Pyle’s interest in dramatic narrative, the content of Adams’s work is often closer in spirit to the socially progressive realistic aesthetic of the Philadelphia newspaper illustrations of John Sloan, whose work, along with that of other artists, was dubbed by the press the Ashcan School and considered radical for its depiction of the working class.

There is greater certainty concerning Adams’s life from 1901 to 1908, as he returned to Atlanta and established the art department of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church’s Morris Brown College in 1901. Listed as “professor of art,” Adams designed curriculum that guided both male and female students through various media disciplines, including mechanical drawing, oil painting, watercolors, and charcoal, pastel, and pencil drawing. According to course catalogs, the art department, among the first at a historically black college, balanced traditional figure studies from plaster casts, still life, and out-of-doors landscape painting. Studio classes were supplemented by lecture series conducted by leading black scholars, including John Hope, W.E.B. DuBois, and the Congregational clergyman the Reverend Henry Hugh Proctor. Adams’s first naturalistic religious paintings, completed in 1902, earned the praise of the city’s major newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution. Its editors reproduced Adams’s biblical painting, The Accused Woman, in the paper’s pages that same year and urged readers to see his works in person.

During his tenure at Morris Brown, Adams also began his best known works, illustrations for the major African American journal of the era, The Voice of the Negro. From 1904 to 1907 he produced more than sixty drawings and political cartoons, as well as articles and poems for the Voice. Adams’s drawing style for the Voice was both conservative and modern, reflecting his admiration for both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. His drawings combined an interest in the Christian uplift and the Arts and Crafts-inspired aesthetics of Washington, as well as actively promoting positive images of African Americans based on self-determined ideas of beauty. In September 1906 the Voice began selling prints of his drawings, telling readers to place in their homes these “educative” works in order “to take the place of those meaningless white angels and black devils on our walls.” (Voice, 622-623). One of these Adams prints, the editors of the Voice claimed, offered a black equivalent of the Gibson Girl, the favored motif of the popular white illustrator Charles Dana Gibson. Adams’s political cartoons often recalled the vigorous marks of Thomas Nast’s work. Those Adams drawings emphasizing moralizing racial uplift were quite similar to the work of Frank Beard. Not only was Beard a famous illustrator, but he was also widely known in the Atlanta black community for his drawings in Booker T. Washington’s first autobiography, An Autobiography: The Story of My Life and Work (1900).

In addition to teaching at Morris Brown, painting, and working for the Voice, Adams found time to work on other projects. In 1905 he collaborated with The Voice contributor Silas Xavier Floyd to create Floyd’s Flowers, a Christian moralizing guide for black parents for which Adams produced more than eighty drawings. Then, in 1906, Adams supplied DuBois with drawings for the short-lived The Moon Illustrated Weekly. The next phase of Adams’s life as an artist, from 1908 - 1928,  saw him leave Atlanta but continue to work for DuBois. The Atlanta Constitution announced in 1908 that Adams planned a trip to Paris to visit the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. Instead Adams moved to Florida in 1908, living most of the time in Jacksonville until the early 1930s, although he lived in Tampa during the late 1920s. In Florida he worked as a newspaper writer and photographer and created drawings for DuBois’s next publication, The Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line. The cover drawing for volume five of the 1909 Horizon showed Adams at his best, revealing how northern white patrons, in their refusal to see black progress, admired a white southern artist transforming a black man into a demeaning caricature. In 1910 Adams worked with DuBois on his new venture, the NAACP’s The Crisis, to which Adams contributed cover illustrations as well as political cartoons. By the late 1920s, when Adams’s last drawings appeared in The Crisis, his style was considered old-fashioned and was replaced by the African-inspired modernism of artists such as Aaron Douglas.

In Adams’s later years the Howard University artist and scholar James Amos Porter stood almost alone in remembering Adams. Porter’s important 1943 Modern Negro Art criticized the uneveness of Adams’s style, but recognized that he was an artist of considerable talent who deserved recognition. Porter seemed unaware that Adams was still alive. In 1948, twenty years after his last drawing appeared in The Crisis, Adams died quietly in a nursing home in Jacksonville, where he had returned two years earlier. Among the few places with Adams’s works in their collections after his fame diminished were the Kenkeleba House in New York City, which had four oil portraits, and the Herndon Home in Atlanta, which had two Adams ink drawings.

Few modern artists experienced such fame and later obscurity as John Henry Adams Jr. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Adams ranked high among the nation’s leading African American artists, becoming perhaps the first nationally known black illustrator in America. Some thought his talent second only to Henry O. Tanner. Yet by the early 1930s Adams had vanished from the public eye. - Michael Bieze

Citation

African American National Biography, Volume 1, Editors Henry Louis Gates Jr, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Oxford University Press. 2008. Pgs. 37-38.