Norman Edward Albert Adams was born on 9 February 1927 to working-class parents at Walthamstow, London. His father was a clerk with London Transport. Norman studied at Harrow School of Art from 1940 to 1946 and won a scholarship to the RCA, before being called up for military service. In 1947 he married Anna Butt and they had two sons. He registered as a conscientious objector and then spent six ‘terrifying’ weeks in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, before winning his appeal against a six-month sentence. That experience convinced him that art had to have a message. ‘In the broadest sense, you might call it religious. I realised that, for me, art without it would be a pretty empty vocation.’Adams then worked as a farm labourer, beginning family life in a primitive cottage. That state of affairs earned him the approval of Marxist critic John Berger, until Adams discovered Jesus Christ. He studied at the RCA in the period 1948-51, was awarded their bronze medal for painting and by the time he left, had formed the view that ‘art was not just a matter of painting objects, but getting beyond objects.’ In the early years of his career, Adams was inspired by the works of J M W Turner and William Blake. In later years, he professed a lifelong admiration for the German expressionists, notably Kirchner and Nolde, and the Belgians, Permeke and Ensor. Adams travelled all over the British Isles and France, drawing and painting. His teaching career commenced in the 1950s, when he taught part-time at St Alban’s Art School. Adams’s first solo exhibition was held in 1952 at Gimpel Fils, London and biennial one-man shows were held from 1953 at Roland, Browse and Delbanco. 1953 also marked the year in which he designed the stage set and costumes for A Mirror of Witches produced by the Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, and again for the Sadler’s Wells production of Saudades in 1955. He painted in the country whenever he could, and came to feel that painters living in cities spent too much time looking over each other’s shoulders, and eventually ‘lose their heritage and are spiritually emasculated.’ Commissions played a large part in Adams’s career, his first being the painting of a mural for Broad Lane Comprehensive School, Coventry in 1954. In 1956 at the time of the birth of their first son, Jacob, the Adamses purchased a cottage in Horton-in-Ribblesdale, near Settle in the Yorkshire Dales. A prolific artist, hailed by some as the greatest watercolourist of his generation, throughout his long career, Adams continued to paint small landscapes in watercolour. Adams courted misunderstanding in an increasingly secular age by accepting church commissions. In 1967 he was commissioned by the Oxford University Press to illustrate parts of the Old Testament. He went on to paint murals for St Anselm’s Church, Kennington, London in 1971 and to make 14 ceramic panels of the Stations of the Cross for Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church, Milton Keynes in 1975. Adams was Head of Painting at Manchester College of Art from 1962 to 1970, but resigned the post, following a dispute over the artistic direction being taken. He was visiting tutor at Leeds University from 1973 to 1976 and Professor of Painting at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1981 to 1986. He was elected Keeper of the RA in 1986, and upon retiring from that position after nine years, was appointed the RA’s Professor of Painting Emeritus in 1995. Adams was elected ARA in 1967, RA in 1972 and Honorary Member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1987. A retrospective of Adams’s work was held in the Diploma Galleries at the RA in 1988 and he had a series of solo exhibitions at the Beaux Arts Galleries, both in London and Bath. Upon the recommendation of Sister Wendy Beckett, in 1994 Adams received another commission for a Fourteen Stations of the Cross, this time in oils, for St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church at Mulberry Street, Manchester. These were installed in November 1995, having first been exhibited in the Sackler Galleries at the RA. Adams considered them to be the greatest work of his life. In later years, he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died on 9 March 2005