John Edward Costigan, painter and printmaker, was born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 29, 1888. Costigan moved to New York in 1903 and was hired by the H. C. Miner Lithography Company. He remained in their employ for twenty-eight years designing theatrical posters. Costigan was primarily self-taught as an artist but he did study briefly at the Art Students League in 1906 and attended unofficial life classes at the Kit-Kat Club [a Broadway theatre on 52^nd Street in the Theatre District of Midtown New York].

Costigan was a member of and exhibited with the American Watercolor Association, the New York Water Color Club, the Allied American Artists, the Salmagundi Club, the American Society of Animal Painters, the National Art Club, the Guild of American Painters, the Philadelphia Society of Etchers, the Society of American Etchers, and the Woodstock Art Association. Costigan was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1926 and elevated to Academician in 1928.

In 1919, Costigan married and moved to a farm in Orangeburg, New York and much of his subject matter related to life on the farm. During the Depression he lost his job with Milner and joined the Public Works of Art Project in New York. He returned to commercial art in 1945, illustrating McCall’s Bluebook magazine for five years.

The work of John Costigan is represented in the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Blanton Museum, the University of Texas at Austin; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin; the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; the Richmond Art Museum, Indiana; the Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, New York; the Springville Museum of Art, Utah; and the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

John Edward Costigan died in Nyack, New York on August, 5, 1972.