William Constable Adam1846 - 1931 William Constable Adam was an English-born oil and watercolor painter of Scottish ancestry who spent the final thirty-three years of his life on the Central Coast of California. Adam was born on August 29, 1846, just south of his paternal Scotland in Tweedmouth on the outskirts of Berwick-upon-Tweed. After completing grammar school, he began evening classes at the Glasgow School of Art. According to the 1861 Census, he resided with his large family in Cathcart, now a suburb of Glasgow. He listed his occupation as "clerk." At the age of 19 he traveled to South America, studied art in Buenos Aires, worked as a broker in Montevideo, and in 1926 published a serialized travelogue of his adventures. On his return to Scotland in the early 1870s, Adam continued his art training under Robert Greenlees and Robert Brydall and became an early member of the Glasgow Art Club. Following travels in North Africa and advanced training in Paris under Auguste Joseph Delécluse, Adam exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts. Upon the death of his wife Ada Rebecca Robertson (1857-1940), the childless William Adam migrated to the United States in the early 1890s, where he settled in Massachusetts, joined the Boston Art Club, and was co-founder and president of the Lowell Art Club. He next moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1895 to become Director of the Art School and Professor of Drawing, Painting and Decorative Arts at Fairmount College. In the late 1890s Adam relocated to California and worked as an accountant for a mining company before moving permanently to the Monterey Peninsula by 1901. There he began to display his paintings locally and received an invitation to exhibit in San Francisco at the prestigious W. K. Vickery Gallery. After twice changing addresses, he purchased a rose-covered Craftsman-style cottage in Pacific Grove (then a Methodist Colony Summer Chautauqua Retreat) at 450 Central Avenue, corner of 12th Street and Greenwood Park with his second wife. Mary Susan Taft Adam was a Maine-born widow and 18 years younger than her husband. Because he taught art classes in Pacific Grove, he was locally known affectionately as “The Professor.” Adam exhibited at a variety of venues, including the Berkeley Art Association in Berkeley, California, the Art Gallery at the luxury Hotel Del Monte in Monterey, and at many private galleries in San Francisco. He spent much of his time at the nearby art colony of Carmel-by-the-Sea where he exhibited at the Carmel Arts and Crafts Club and the Carmel Art Association between 1906 and 1927. Especially popular with tourists were his many renderings of the local Spanish architecture, lush gardens and charming scenes along the Pacific Coast and Monterey Bay. For competitive exhibitions in both watercolor and oil, he executed highly original landscapes in bright color palettes, employing the bold and dramatic brushwork of the French Impressionists. William Adam died in Pacific Grove on 17 October 17, 1931.