Jane G. Jamison | Artist, 82

Jane Gray Jamison, 82, of West Chester, an artist, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease Feb. 16 at Sunrise Assisted Living in Westtown.

Mrs. Jamison grew up in the historic 18th-century "Dower House" in West Chester and attended Friends Community School in West Chester, where she met her future husband, Philip Jamison. She graduated from Colby Junior College in New Hampshire and from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, now the University of the Arts.

She and her husband worked in a West Chester antiques shop run by her mother-in-law, Daisy Jamison, making lampshades for interior designers.

In the late 1950s when 20 of their paintings sold in one weekend at the Christmas Shop at Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, the couple decided to pursue a fine arts career.

Mrs. Jamison often exhibited her loose, colorful watercolors with her husband and other artists, but her first solo show wasn't until 2000. "It just never came up," she told a reporter at the time. She credited her her "agent, framer and hero" husband with organizing the show at the DeBottis Gallery in West Chester.

The exhibit featured paintings ranging from interior views of her home in West Chester to abstract forms of lobster traps and old fishing sheds painted at her summer home in Vinalhaven, a small island off the coast of Rockland, Maine.

Mrs. Jamison was a member of the West Chester Golf Club for more than 70 years.

In addition to her husband, she is survived by a son, Philip III, and twin daughters Terry and Linda.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow at First Presbyterian Church, 130 W. Miner St., West Chester.