George Lambdin was born in 1830 in Pittsburgh, the son of James Reid Lambdin, a successful portraitist from whom he received his early artistic training. In 1838, his family moved to Philadelphia, where he resided until his death except for a brief residence in New York City and trips to Europe in 1855 and 1870. Lambdin began exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1848. His first successes came from genre paintings, which included sentimental scenes of childhood, bereavement and Civil War subjects. Within these earlier works, he included flowers, usually roses, and, in 1857, Lambdin turned to painting still life, concentrating on floral themes for the remainder of his life. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1868. He settled in Germantown, near Philadelphia, in 1870 and cultivated a garden famous for roses. It was here that he found the subject matter for his brush. His paintings of flowers were extremely popular and were widely reproduced as chromolithographs. Along with Martin J. Heade, Lambdin is considered one of the major American specialists in floral painting in the late nineteenth century. George Cochran Lambdin died in 1896. Lambdin's paintings can be found in the Yale University Art Gallery, Morris Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, Reading Public Museum and The Denver Art Museum.