Adam Lehr (1853-1924) was a Cleveland-born American painter whose long career made him one of the central figures of the vibrant artistic community that flourished in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Ohio. Cleveland-born Lehr trained as a house and sign painter as a young man, an experience that gave him a practical familiarity with the materials and techniques of the trade before he pursued formal artistic training. He soon gained more serious instruction under the American painter Archibald Willard, a family friend and the author of the famous painting The Spirit of '76, whose mentorship shaped Lehr's early development as an artist.

In 1880 Lehr departed, with financial assistance from a local merchant, for New York, where he studied at the Art Students League for a year. Returning to Cleveland in 1881, Lehr began exhibiting regularly at Cleveland's Brush and Palette Club, the Watercolor Society, and the Cleveland Society of Artists, quickly establishing himself within the city's active exhibition circuit. Known primarily as a still life and landscape painter, he built his reputation through carefully observed pictures of the Ohio countryside, seasonal floral arrangements, and quiet interior compositions.

Lehr was a founder of the Cleveland Art Club, a group of prominent artists who taught at the Cleveland Academy of Art, and he became one of the most respected figures in the Cleveland artistic community during the formative years of the region's modern art tradition. He exhibited regularly throughout his life, though he often supplemented his income with commercial painting, an unpretentious approach to his working life that placed him within the practical tradition of many American painters of his generation. His paintings are held in Cleveland-area museums and in significant private collections, where they remain vital documents of the artistic achievement of the region during a formative period in its cultural life.