James Bowman

James Bowman was an American itinerant artist and portrait painter. He was born in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh. Sometime between 1813 and 1815, James Bowman went to Chillicothe, Ohio, to learn to be a carpenter. There he met the itinerant painter Mr. J. T. Turner who taught him the rudiments of portrait painting. He gained considerable success when he started out professionally, painting in Pittsburgh and other communities in the early 1820s. He traveled to Philadelphia to learn from the masters there, but as a beginning artist could not make a living in that more cosmopolitan and competitive environment and became an itinerant portrait painter instead.