File:Construction of Wachusett Dam, Clinton, Mass., 1903 - DPLA - 35897f8db4536fb556f17a28f292c6b6.jpg

Massachusetts Metropolitan District Commission (acquired between 1973 and about 1989); Massachusetts Metropolitan Water Works construction; scene painted about October 1903; painting is signed and dated in lower left corner; Oscar F. Adler; Oscar F. Adler (1868-1932) was an American impressionist painter from Massachusetts. He was born and raised in Clinton, MA, and mostly had a studio in Clinton and Easthampton. By the time he was 23, both of his parents had died in their early 50s (first his mother in 1889, followed by his father in 1890); his father was a weaver in a cotton mill. Both of his parents were born in Germany in the 1830s. According to AskART.com, Adler “studied in Germany and then Paris during the late 1880s. He returned from Europe, highly influenced by the work of Daubigney, Millet and the French Impressionists. Although he adhered to the academic traditions revered by Munich School, by 1900 he was an academic Impressionist.” After studying art in Europe, he returned to Massachusetts, residing generally in Boston in the 1890s, Clinton in the 1900s-1910s, and Easthampton in the 1920s, and until his death. He was living in Clinton at the time of the Commonwealth’s construction of the Wachusett Reservoir and Dam during the early 1900s. Adler painted this view of the Wachusett Dam under construction in 1903, and likely dates from about October of that year. Compare with the Metropolitan Water Works Image No. 5325, taken on November 2, 1903. https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:2801pg844 He often painted landscape scenes from around Clinton; and central Massachusetts. Adler’s protégé was Albert G. Kiesling (1885-1968), also born in Clinton. Kiesling moved to Easthampton, MA during the early 1910s, and Adler followed him in the early 1920s. According to the 1910 and 1930 U.S. Census, Oscar Adler was boarding with Albert Kiesling; and boarding with other members of the Kiesling family at the time of the 1920 Census. Adler died on April 19, 1932, in a Springfield, MA hospital, and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Clinton, MA. The following year, on October 7 and 8, Kiesling posted an advertisement in the Springfield Republican seeking buyers for “oil paintings by Oscar Adler”, from his home, where Adler was living when he died. According to a May 7, 1973 photo and photo caption in the Clinton Daily Item, the 1903 painting of the Wachusett Dam under construction was owned in 1973 by William Kiesling (1908-1996), formerly of Clinton (and of Methuen in 1973), and nephew to the painter Albert G. Kiesling. How the painting came to be owned by DCR’s predecessor agency, the Metropolitan District Commission (MDC), sometime between 1973 and 1989, is not known. The Commonwealth has owned this painting since at least about 1989.