Jasper Lawman was considered an American Landscape and portrait painter. He was born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1825 and died in Cleveland (Xenia), Ohio on April 1, 1906. In 1859, Lawman traveled to Paris to study at the atelier of Couture. Upon completion of his studies in Paris, he returned to the United States and opened his studio in Pittsburgh. It was at this time that he became a member of a new group of artists. The Scalp Level group, east of Pittsburgh near Johnstown, which became a local "Barbizon" and a favored painting ground from the mid-1860s, until well into the 1890s, when a coal mine was opened there. Here Mr. Lawman flourished as a painter of intimate, dark wooded scenes in which the human presence is subordinated to natural forms.

Jasper Lawman was a frequent exhibitor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and became a part of the early movement of the Hudson River School. After a time his fine art renderings earned him many important portrait commissions and he went on to become one of the more popular portrait painters in Western Pennsylvania.

LISTED:

Mantle Fielding
Who Was Who in American Art
The New York Historical Society's "Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860"
"Art Across America", Two Centuries of Regional Painting

Biography courtesy of Roughton Galleries, www.antiquesandfineart.com/roughton