Joseph Denovan Adam R.S.A R.S.W

1842-1896

Adam was born in Glasgow. He made several trips to the Highlands with his father - himself a noted painter - and several pictures are joint efforts by father and son. Joseph senior painted the landscape; junior, of course, did the cattle.However, he spent much of his youth in London where he studied at what is now the Royal College of Art. There he sought relief from the academic regime by escaping occasionally to Spitalfield cattle market, where the beasts in the ring were more attractive than the plaster casts and the life models of the studio.

The lure of Scotland was strong and Denovan moved north permanently in 1870, first to Crieff and then to Stirling, not far from the village of Cambuskenneth which became a haunt for several of the Glasgow Boys, whom he knew. His most significant success came in 1890, when he had an exhibition in London which won almost universal praise from the critics.

Adam was a stickler for painting from nature, in the open, and in a field close to Craigmill House, where he lived between 1887 and 1895, he built a studio, part wooden hut, part glass conservatory, to serve as an all-weather base - his ``cattle atelier'' as he called it in an advertisement. Here he established a school of animal painting where he kept many live animals for students to paint

``The Studio and Pens are placed in the middle of a field, under the most favourable conditions as to light, and every other requisite for study, in all states of the weather''.

This curious construction grew rickety across the years and the last remnants blew down in a gale, but a recent owner of Craigmill House had part of it rebuilt more or less as it was.

Several paintings have surfaced abroad - they are in public collections from Riga in Latvia to Sarasota, Florida.