John Spelman

An outdoor enthusiast, John Adams Spelman Jr., painted what he loved: the unspoiled wilderness of northern Minnesota and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. He depicted seasonal changes, often using reflections in bodies of water in the foreground.

Spelman was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in the southeastern part of the state. When he was twelve years old, his family moved to Minneapolis, sixty-five miles to the north. He went to North Community High School and studied for a short period at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, then located in the public library. Around 1900, Spelman moved to Oak Park, Illinois, an emerging suburb of Chicago. He lived a few blocks from Frank Lloyd Wright's home and studio and Ernest Hemingway's birthplace. Working with his brothers in a newspaper circulation company, Spelman studied with John Vanderpoel and Charles Frances Browne and attended night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago to experience some artistic education.

In Chicago, Spelman became involved with the Palette and Chisel Club (now the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art), which provided space for aspiring artists to work with nude models during daylight hours, usually Sundays. It was probably there or at the Chicago Society of Artists that he met Rudolph Ingerle, a Viennese artist who in the 1920s made regular visits to the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. Ingerle became known as "Painter of the Smokies" and in Chicago exhibited paintings from his travels. Apparently inspired by Ingerle's work, Spelman headed south to the Smokies near Gatlinburg and Asheville where he depicted autumnal views of the same mountain ranges, trees, and lakes.

Spelman's son and namesake, John Adams Spelman III (1912–1969), became an artist and followed in his father's footsteps rendering imagery similar to his father's in linoleum prints. In 1936 he attended Black Mountain College in western North Carolina, as well as the Farm School at Swannanoa (now Warren Wilson College) before becoming a staff member at the Pine Mountain Settlement School in Bledsoe, Kentucky. He reflected on his father's influence: "My father was an artist, a landscape painter, of the first degree. His oils of the Southern Appalachians were lovely and idealistic. I know that the first consciousness I must have had of a mountain cabin snuggled against a hill was in one of his numerous pictures of the Blue Ridge mountains. He must have painted and sketched hundreds and hundreds of them. Perhaps, because I had seen a few of them and had thought them romantic, but had never known the real life-fact of living in one, I suddenly became interested in drawing houses at an early age."

After spending time in the Southeast, Spelman Jr. returned to the northern reaches of his natal state, painting the shores of Lake Superior, many times in the snow. He purchased land for a rustic cabin and studio near Grand Marais, Minnesota, where his family spent summers. Spelman painted landscapes that spanned the seasons, often staying behind to paint early winter scenes when the rest of his family returned to Oak Park. He died there at age sixty.