George Gustav Adomeit (1879 - 1967) was born in Memel in Germany (now Klaipeda in Lithuania) His family moved to the United States and settled in 1883 to Cleveland, Ohio. It became his home, and which was where he died in 1967. He trained in commercial printing, studied at the Cleveland School of Art and supported himself as a commercial artist and printmaker. He was also co-founder and long-time president of the Caxton Press Company, a printing company that was bought by the Fetter Printing Company in 1955.
Adomeit was both a skilled Impressionist painter and one of the finest printers of exhibition catalogues in the country. Adomeit did not paint for a living. Nevertheless, he painted a significant body of work and exhibited it throughout the country. An annual contributor to the May Show at the Cleveland Museum of Art, he won over a dozen prizes there from 1923 to 1946. His canvas Cleveland Under Snow (n.d.) is a fine example of plein-air painting and an exuberant display of the type of brushwork popularized by Duveneck, Henri, and Bellows.
Adomeit was a founder of the Cleveland Society of Artists. In the 1920s he emerged as one of the region's leading painters of American Scene genre. He was especially known for industrial subjects, landscapes and cityscapes, for his paintings and drawings of portraits and figure studies. Many of his pictures are in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
