Noted Colorado landscape painter Charles Partridge Adams moved to Denver from Massachusseets in 1858 where he first worked as an engraver at a bookstore. While he briefly studied painting with Helen Chain – herself a student of the tonalist painter George Inness -- Adams was largely a self-taught artist.

Adams first publicly exhibited in Denver in 1886, and exhibited in both local and national shows through 1908. He was a charter member of the Denver Artists Club (1893), and achieved considerable success with his Colorado scenes. After a trip to Europe in 1916, Adams settled in Southern California where he remained for the rest of his career with a studio in Laguna Beach.

Adams was enormously skilled at depicting various effects of light and atmosphere, as revealed in this accomplished coastal scene. Using bravura brushwork typical of the American Impressionists, Adams made use of a softly tonal palette to depict the burnished glow of the setting sun over the Monterey bay. His ability to render the diffuse light, with pink tinged clouds and glinting surface of the sea is amplified by the deft use of texture and impasto indicating crashing waves and shaggy stands of cypress trees.

Works by Charles Partridge Adams are held in the Denver Museum of Art, the Phoenix Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of Art and the Portland (Oregon) Museum of Art, amongst other public collections.