The Philadelphia Practitioner Albert Jean Adolphe was a fixture of the American art scene, a man whose career spanned the transition from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth. Born in Philadelphia, he did not merely inhabit the city; he helped define its visual landscape through a diverse range of professional roles. He was a decorator, a portrait painter, and a landscape artist who moved between the precision of oil and the fluidity of watercolor. His early promise was evident in the life-size portraits of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington he painted on a firehouse fence in…