Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life.

Lawrence continued his studies as well, working with Alston and Henry Bannarn, another Harlem Renaissance artist, in the Alston-Bannarn workshop.

The "hard, bright, brittle" aspects of Harlem during the Great Depression inspired Lawrence as much as the colors, shapes, and patterns inside the homes of its residents.

Lawrence started to gain some notice for his dramatic and lively portrayals of both contemporary scenes of African-American urban life as well as historical events, all of which he depicted in crisp shapes, bright, clear colors, dynamic patterns, and through revealing posture and gestures.

[2] At the very start of his career he developed the approach that made his reputation and remained his touchstone: creating series of paintings that told a story or, less often, depicted many aspects of a subject.

He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture, who led the revolution of the slaves that eventually gained independence, was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

His early work involved general depictions of everyday life in Harlem and also a major series dedicated to African-American history (1940–1941).

His teacher Charles Alston assesses Lawrence's work in an essay for an exhibition at the Harlem YMCA 1938:[5] Having thus far miraculously escaped the imprint of academic ideas and current vogues in art,... he has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations...

The series portrayed the Great Migration, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North after World War I.

Because he was working in tempera, which dries rapidly, he planned all the paintings in advance and then applied a single color wherever he was using it across all the scenes to maintain tonal consistency.

[9] In 1943, Howard Devree, wrote for The New York Times, that Lawrence in his next series of thirty images had "even more successfully concentrated his attention on the many-sided life of his people in Harlem".

He posed, still in his uniform, in front of a sign that read: "Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series and Works Created in the US Coast Guard".

[12] In 1946, Josef Albers recruited Lawrence to join the faculty of the summer art program at Black Mountain College.

[13] Returning to New York, Lawrence continued to paint but grew depressed; in 1949, he checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, where he remained for eleven months.

The series, originally planned to include sixty panels, ranges from references to current events like the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings and relatively obscure or neglected aspects of American history, like a woman, Margaret Cochran Corbin, in combat or the wall built by unseen enslaved Blacks that protected the American forces at the Battle of New Orleans.

He titled a panel depicting Patrick Henry's famous speech with the less well-known passage: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery."

A panel depicting an African American slave revolt is titled with the words of a man who sued for emancipation from slavery in 1773: "We have no property!

"[15] The fraught politics of the mid-1950s prevented the series from finding a museum purchaser, and the panels had been sold to a private collector who re-sold them as individual works.

The show featured some of the top names in the country, including Ellen Powell Tiberino, Horace Pippin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Barbara Bullock, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Roland Ayers, Romare Bearden, Avel de Knight, Barkley Hendricks, Paul Keene, Raymond Saunders, Louis B. Sloan, Ed Wilson, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Joshua Johnson.

The Washington Post described it as "enormously sophisticated yet wholly unpretentious " and said:[28] The colors are completely flat, but because the porcelain is layered, and because Lawrence here and there paints in strong black shadows, his mural has the look of a rich relief.

Commissioned to provide full-page illustrations for a new edition of a work of his choice, Lawrence chose John Hersey's Hiroshima (1946).

[7][29] Lawrence's painting Theater was commissioned by the University of Washington in 1985 and installed in the main lobby of the Meany Hall for the Performing Arts.

[18] In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists.