John Quincy Adams (1873-1933) with embedded web links

Person
John Quincy Adams was born in Vienna on 23rd December 1873[i]. He was the son of the American tenor Charles Runey Adams (1834-1900) and the Hungarian singer Nina Bleyer (1835-1899), both of whom were engaged at the Vienna Court Opera. Adams is a distant relative[ii] (but not a direct descendent) of the Second (John Adams, 1735-1826) and the Sixth President of the United States of America (John Quincy, Adams 1767-1848), after whom he was named. In 1879 the Adams family relocated to Boston, where Adams went to school. In 1886 Charles Runey and Nina Adams separated and in 1887 Nina Adams returned with the children[iii] to Vienna.

Adams received his first artistic training at the painting school Scheffert in 1891. From 1892-1896 he studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and completed his studies at the Academy in Munich in 1897 and at the Académie Julien in Paris in 1898 (he was a regular exhibitor at the Académie until 1912). In 1902, Adams was elected to the Vienna Künstlerhaus (Vienna’s premier artists’ society, before the Secession was formed in 1897 by a dissident group of artists from the Künstlerhaus). Adams participated regularly in exhibitions organized by the Künstlerhaus and was awarded all the prizes and distinctions possible.

In 1901 Adams married Steffie Sobotka (1881-1952) who, prior to their marriage, had converted to Protestantism. The couple had two daughters: Gladys (1902-1932) who upon marriage became Frank (she died tragically in a car accident in 1932) and Harriet (1905-1999), who upon marriage became Countess Walderdorff[iv]. Adams had three grandchildren: Count Johannes Walderdorff, Salzburg (1936-), and Barbara (1927-1993) and Nina (1931-2010) Frank who lived in Austria until 1938. The two girls, together with their father Gustl and stepmother Hedwig Frank and their grandmother Steffie Adams/von Gutmann, were racially persecuted[v] by the Nazis and fled Austria. They all survived the war in exile, Nina and Steffie in Belgium and Barbara with the Frank family in the USA.

John Quincy and Steffie Adams separated in 1919 and divorced in 1920. Steffie Adams married Willy von Gutmann in 1921 and John Quincy married Franziska (Francis/Frances) Zierhut around 1930 or 1932. After an extended stay in the USA in 1929/30 and 1930/31, when Adams painted many portraits of members of the US government, the US Senate, academia and society in general, he returned to Vienna in 1932 and died of stomach cancer on 15th March 1933. He is buried in an honorary grave of the city of Vienna (the tombstone was made by the sculptor Otto Ofner).

There have been two large exhibitions of his works in Vienna: in 1917 at the Künstlerhaus (69 works) and in 1986 in the exhibition Viennese Society in Portrait at the Academy of Fine Arts (exhibition and catalogue include 62 works).

Artist
The artistic legacy of Adams comprises (based on research to date) some 500 paintings and drawings in the fields of genre, landscape and portrait painting. By subject and style his work spans a very wide range, far beyond the simplistic label, painter of beautiful and elegant Viennese women, as he is often characterized in the contemporary press.

After an early formative phase (to about 1900) where he is firmly grounded in the historical (Markart-style) tradition (this is exemplified in the painting of the actress Helene Odilon, 1903), he regularly visited the artist colony in Volendam, the Netherlands. There he painted naturalistic, sometimes in very large format, subdued colored genre scenes of everyday life and death of fishermen and workers and their families (e.g. Death Prayer in the Poor House of Volendam, 1903 or the Tryptich Life’s Journey, 1905).

At the same time his painting style in his portraits evolved towards rapid, impressionistic brush strokes with a reduced color palette (e.g. the opera singer Drill Orridge, 1907), unconventional (and controversial) subjects (The [Gynecological] Operation, 1909) and unusual composition (The Artist and his Family, 1908 – a portrait of the Adams family), and works that also include irony and humor (The 7 Executioners, 1904 – Künstleraus colleagues judging a painting for admission to an exhibition, alas lost; or The Comparison [art versus reality], 1914).

Plein-air nude studies in the Jugendstil style (Nude Study at Wolfgangsee, 1911) expanded Adams portfolio (but drew criticism from being too close in style to the rival Secession artists). Adams established himself increasingly as a leading portrait painter of Viennese society. His sitters included all higher echelons of society: artists, (moneyed) bourgeoisie, aristocracy, ultimately (the highest distinction) even the Emperor and the Imperial Family (portrait of Emperor Franz Josef I., 1914; three portraits of Emperor Karl, 1916-17, and about two dozen members of the (wider) Imperial Family).

During the war of 1914-1918 Adams was a member of the group of artists belonging to the war press corps and painted around 50 paintings on practically all war fronts, - the East, the South, the Adriatic Sea and the Balkans. Partly drawing on a new bright color palette, he painted the horrors of war (Destroyed Bridge over the Pruth River, 1915), landscapes (Lovcen-Pass, 1916), propaganda genre pictures (My Homeland, 1916/17) as well as portraits of character ranging from generals (Ignaz Edler von Korda, 1915), officers (Rudolf Singule, 1916, captain of the U-4 submarine,) as well as soldiers (studies and portraits of Kaiserjäger soldiers, 1916).

After the war Adams focused exclusively on portraits. His often glamorous portraits (e.g. Kitty Countess Schönborn, later Rothschild, 1916, Countess Michael Karolyi, [née Countess Katalin Andrássy, the so-called “red Countess”], 1918, or Countess Marie Traun, 1919) responded to the demands of his aristocratic clientele for self-representation in an age when they had lost all their high social positions, titles, and even names. Adams complied, but also countered through varying postures, styles and execution. He introduced unusual (Christl Fries-Tersch, 1929) or -in the new age unusually classical (Marie von Stribersky, 1924) postures, ever more sedate, Rembrandt-like style, color schemes (Countess Alice Harrach, 1919, Madame de Portas, 1925) and with more and more impressionistic brush strokes (Princess Mena Fürstenberg, 1927). Backgrounds become simpler and stylized, ultimately disappearing altogether leaving only a white canvass as the background (Prince Alexander Dietrichstein-Nikolsburg, 1927). Finally, the models for his portraits are painted irrespective of rank and class in simple modern clothes and with a casual posture (Mr William Stuard-Spaulding Jr, 1930; Prince Karl Egon Fürstenberg, 1929).

In all his paintings, Adams remained true to a naturalistic style, where viewers can easily recognize a person or subject. Despite being a child of the 19th century, John Quincy Adams nonetheless ultimately arrived in the modernity of the 20th century and can still excite any art and history loving person of the 21st century.

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[i] Multiple birthdates are given in the literature (1873 to 1875). The date of 23rd December 1873 is given in Adam’s baptism record and his registration card and this date was also adopted by the most authoritative Austrian biographical lexicon (österr. Biographischen Lexikon).

[ii] Their direct common ancestor being Henry Adams of Somerset (1583–1646, see. Adams entry by Christopher Wenthworth-Stanley in the Laszlo Catalogue Raisonnee.

[iii] Adams had four siblings in Vienna: Charles V. Adams; Victoria D., married Biro, Luise E.; married Teltscher; and Mary A., married Teltscher (multiple marriages between families were not uncommon in Vienna around 1900).

[iv] Owner of the Goldener Hirsch hotel and restaurant in Salzburg.

[v] Steffie and Willy von Gutmann were divorced in 1924. Upon their marriage in 1921 Willy conferred to Steffie the property rights of Würting castle in the province of Upper Austria, where the vast collection of paintings from Adams’ estate was stored. The castle and associated large agricultural estates were seized by the Nazis in 1938 (as were the considerable properties of the Frank family) and the castle was handed over to a SS unit as a training center. Würting castle was restituted only in 1952 and under a shameful settlement agreement (the agreement required a considerable financial compensation to be paid by Steffie to the province of Upper Austria). She was forced to sell the castle to cover the costs of the settlement as well as lawyers and other legal fees. The final restitution of all her assets was only completed by 1967, fifteen years after her death.