From his earliest years Adams had desired to be a sculptor. He came of an old family of good New England stock and was born at West Concord, Vermont, in 1858, but passed his boyhood in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. A general education at the local grammar and high school was supplemented by special studies at the Worcester Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Normal Art School. Then followed a period of five years in Paris, where he studied under Mercié, the pupil of Falguière. Among the many sculptors with whom he came in contact, he felt most strongly the influence of these two, both natives of Toulouse, in whose art the poetry of the south mingles with academic elegance and technical perfection. During these years, too, he studied in the galleries and frequented the Louvre, not only for the sculpture, but also for the paintings. That the latter should have attracted him may seem at first sight hardly worth mentioning; since, indeed, no student of art, whatever his _metier_ would be likely to escape the fascination of the paintings. But Adams seems to have been very conscious of it then, and to look back upon it now as one of the distinct influences of his student days. And that painting had an influence, and a very marked one, upon his technique and motives as a sculptor, one can scarcely doubt. His early work shows more feeling for the harmonic rendering of light and shade and for the decorative treatment of the surface than for the structure and character of the form. It reveals also, especially in his busts, that specialisation of sentiment, limited in range, very quietly intense in kind, tinctured frequently with enigmatic suggestion, which is so often found in Italian sculpture and painting of the fifteenth century. That he had felt that influence has occurred to many observers of Adams’s work; yet it was not until five years ago that he visited Italy. Accordingly, it must have been to his studies at the Louvre that he owed his acquaintance with Italian art; and the paintings as well as the sculpture, perhaps as much as it, must have shaped his impressions. And the work of the marble sculptors of the fifteenth century, of men like Mino da Fiesole and Maiano, is strongly pictorial in character, frequently with more of the painter quality than the sculptor, with great regard for highly finished surfaces and delicate richness of light and shade. They represented the higher tendencies of the thought of their time: subtle and refined and elegantly Platonic. To some corresponding partiality is apparently due the inclination of Adams’s mind toward this particular expression of sculpture. For, while sculpture responds to the most vigorous conceptions of the artist, it lends itself also to the most sensitive idealisation; more so in a measure than painting, since the absence of the realism of colour makes a greater demand upon the imagination and keeps the representation more nearly within the region of the abstract.