William Joseph Eastman was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1888. He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, graduated in 1912, and continued on to the Art Students League in New York. He returned to the Cleveland Institute of Art and became an instructor and remained so until his death in 1950.

William Joseph Eastman was a pioneer of early American Modernist painting associated with the ‘Cleveland School’ of artists during the early-mid 20th century. His dramatic and highly stylized landscape paintings feature a lush and unusual color palette. As an important teacher at The Cleveland School of Art for more than forty years, he mentored legions of talented students, perhaps most notably, Charles Burchfield. He was a frequent prize winning exhibitor in the annual May Show at The Cleveland Museum, exhibiting every year from 1919 to 1950. Mr. Eastman exhibited widely throughout the United States in numerous important museum shows from the late teens into the 1940’s.