Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1900 and a graduate of Portland High School, John Heagan Eames spent the early part of his adult life traveling between Maine, New York and Europe. He returned yearly to Boothbay Harbor and lived in Wiscasset. Eames graduated from Harvard in 1922 and then attended the Harvard Graduate School of Architecture. He worked for almost ten years in New York architectural offices before traveling to London to study art. Eames worked in a tradition of painters and etchers that included James Abbott McNeill Whistler, John Taylor Arms, Malcolm Osborne and Robert Austin. The last two were his teachers during the early 1930s at the Royal College of Art in London. Eames had an extensive list of exhibition credits going back to 1935, which included the Royal Academy in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Venice Biennial, the New York World's Fair in 1939, among many others. His work is in many permanent collections including the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 1992 the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston honored the artist with a major exhibition of his prints and watercolors. Eames was a Senior Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers and member of the National Academy of Design.