Happy Birthday, James Reid Lambdin!
James Lambdin was born in 1807 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied art in Philadelphia for two years under Thomas Sully. In 1826, Lambdin returned to Pittsburgh and founded the Pittsburgh Museum of Natural History and Gallery of Fine Art, which contained over fifty paintings and four-hundred fossils. Throughout his life, he served as the president of the Artists' Society Fund in Pittsburgh, director of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine art, professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the official art commissioners of the United States. He is best known for his portraits of fifteen US presidents and other important American figures.
