Thomas Sinclair, born in 1807 in the Orkney Islands (Northern Scotland), was one of the premier Philadelphia lithographers of the 19th-century, particularly in the field of chromolithography. Trained in lithography in Edinburgh, Sinclair immigrated to the United States ca. 1830 and worked in New York and Philadelphia where he and his wife Magdalena (b. ca. 1808) had nine of their ten children as noted in the 1850 census.

Settling in Philadelphia in 1839, he worked at the lithographic shop of John Collins (79 South Third Street) before assuming the establishment in 1840. A practical lithographer throughout his career, Sinclair produced all genres of lithographs including maps, advertisements, city and landscape views, sheet music cov...