John Adams Elder (3 February 1833–25 February 1895), painter, was born in Fredericksburg and was the son of John Douglas Elder, a shoemaker, and Mary M. Phillips Elder. He began drawing and painting as a boy, and his work caught the attention of John Minor, a wealthy Fredericksburg arts patron and former newspaper publisher. About 1850 Minor provided funds for Elder to travel to New York City, where he studied with Daniel Huntington, a leading portraitist and landscape painter. Minor may have introduced Elder to Emanuel Leutze, a German artist who was then visiting the United States and who had once lived in Fredericksburg. In 1852, again with Minor's financial support, Elder accompanied Leutze when the latter artist returned to Düsseldorf. He worked in Leutze's atelier and later in the Kunstakademie, where he received a thorough education in drawing from plaster casts and live models. Suffering financial difficulties that arose from having to pay for models, Elder sent paintings to Fredericksburg for sale. Minor placed the works in local stores and sold several through raffles. After declining a prize for study in Rome, Elder returned to New York in October 1855 and soon was back in Virginia.

Elder established a studio in Fredericksburg, but after a fire in December 1857 he took up part-time residence in Richmond. He was noted for his portraits of local residents as well as for sentimental genre scenes. Although his education in Düsseldorf had emphasized naturalism and a strong sense of color that could often result in figures lacking spontaneity or vitality, his painting of survivors of a shipwreck exhibited at the Mechanics' Fair in Richmond in October 1856 garnered special notice in the Richmond Daily Dispatch as "a work of decided genius."

During the Civil War, Union forces bombarding Fredericksburg in December 1862 damaged Elder's house. Subsequently he enlisted in an artillery company and served as an aide to a Confederate captain. Elder frequently worked as a draftsman in the Confederate Department of War. Present in Petersburg during the Battle of the Crater in 1864, he sketched a battlefield scene and soon afterward completed a large-scale painting that was destroyed in the Richmond evacuation fire of April 1865. Former Confederate general William Mahone, whose troops had repulsed the Union advance at the Crater, later commissioned Elder to paint a second, even larger version. When released in 1870, the painting was regarded as the definitive rendition of the battle.

After the war, Elder settled in Richmond. Although he was recognized as an accomplished portraitist, his oeuvre also included anecdotal genre pieces that were gaining popularity among American art collectors. Evoking a mythic southern society of gentility, Elder's scenes sometimes included images of happy African Americans, such as a young, smiling boy in Eating Watermelon and an old man resting in a chair in a tranquil farmscape in Contentment. Elder exhibited work at the National Academy of Design, in New York, in 1868, 1877, and 1885. In 1884 the American Art Association displayed Custer's Last Charge, another of his large works in the grand manner of history painting. Rejected by the New York Times art critic as "a melodramatic and in all ways objectionable battle scene," the painting was exhibited at the end of that year in New Orleans at the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition and in 1885 at the Southern Exposition, in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Civil War provided the inspiration for Elder's best-known works. His more successful small paintings of vignettes from the war, such as The Scout's Return and The Scout's Prize (1865), focused on the exploits of individual soldiers. Appomattox (1887), depicting a solitary Confederate soldier contemplating the defeat of the South, proved so popular that Elder painted several versions. In 1888 he received a commission from the R. E. Lee Camp, United Confederate Veterans, in Alexandria, to cast the figure in bronze as a monument to Confederate soldiers in that city. Elder worked with the sculptor Caspar Buberl to develop small models for committee approval. The monument was unveiled on 24 May 1889.

Throughout his career Elder painted portraits of many distinguished Virginians, including several of the state's governors and former Confederate generals. Many of his works were painted from life, although like other painters he occasionally used photographs as the basis for portraits in oil to remove the necessity of repeated sittings by the subject. During the 1870s the philanthropist and art collector William Wilson Corcoran, of Washington, D.C., commissioned Elder to paint three-quarter-length portraits of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert Edward Lee. In 1887 Elder traveled to Biloxi, Mississippi, to paint a portrait of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. While there, Elder contracted malaria. About 1889 he suffered a stroke that rendered him unable to paint any longer.

Elder never married, although family lore held that he had loved Mollie Fisher, of Richmond, but believed he could not provide her with sufficient financial support. Reportedly her portrait was in his room when John Adams Elder died in Fredericksburg early in the morning of 25 February 1895. He was buried in the city's Confederate Cemetery.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which owns several of Elder's paintings, mounted a comprehensive exhibition of his artwork in 1947. The Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center opened a retrospective exhibition in 2007. Numerous museum collections, including the former Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Virginia State Artwork Collection, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, hold examples of Elder's paintings. As part of a national reexamination of Confederate monuments, the memorial in Alexandria was removed in 2020.

Sources Consulted:
Biographies (with variant death date of 24 Feb. 1895) in Raleigh T. Daniel, "John A. Elder, a Biographical Sketch," undated typescript, Library of Virginia (LVA), Charles Moore, "Sketch of John A. Elder and His Work" (1914 typescript, LVA), Ralph Happel, "John A. Elder, Confederate Painter," Commonwealth 4 (Aug. 1937): 23–25 (variant birthplace of Washington, D.C.), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, A Retrospective Exhibition of the Work of John Adams Elder, 1833–1895 (1947), Margaret Coons, "A Portrait of His Times," Virginia Cavalcade 16 (spring 1967): 15–31, and Barbara C. Batson and Tracy L. Kamerer, A Capital Collection: Virginia's Artistic Inheritance (2005), 24–27; correspondence in John Adams Elder Papers and William Mahone Papers, both in David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC, and in various collections at The Valentine, Richmond; correspondence, sketches, and only known photographic portrait (1881) of Elder in Doris Butler Van Swaringen Collection, Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 29 Oct. 1856 (first quotation); New York Times, 16 Nov. 1884 (second quotation); Fredericksburg Death Register; obituaries in Fredericksburg Daily Star, 25 Feb. 1895 ("died this morning at 2 o'clock"), and New York Times, 27 Feb. 1895 ("died Monday," 25 Feb.); obituary and editorial tribute in Fredericksburg Free Lance, 26 Feb. ("died at 2 A.M. yesterday"), 1 Mar. 1895.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Barbara C. Batson.

How to cite this page:
Barbara C. Batson, "John Adams Elder (1833–1895)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 ({url}, accessed [today's date]).

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