Jama was born in
Ljubljana, where he attended primary school and lower grammar school. He then moved with his family to
Zagreb, where he began to show an interest in painting when in higher grammar school. After finishing grammar school, he enrolled in the law faculty, but in 1890 he quit his studies and left for
Munich, where he enrolled in a private art school. Two years later, he returned to Ljubljana, where he made a living with his drawings. During this time, he drew illustrations for the journal
Dom in svet. With the support of the
Carniolan
Provincial Diet, he returned to Munich in 1897, where he enrolled in
Anton Ažbe's art school. The following year, he enrolled at the Munich artistic academy, but he did not finish his studies there. In 1902, he married the Dutch painter
Louise van Raders. Jama lived and worked in different places throughout Europe:
Austria,
Croatia, Germany and the
Netherlands. Later, he returned to the
Slovene Lands, where he lived for a while in
Bled and in
Volčji Potok. Finally, he settled in
Rašica and then in Ljubljana. Besides oil paintings, Jama also drew designs for posters and illustrations. Among others, he illustrated the first editions of several books by the famous modernist writer
Ivan Cankar. His idols in his later life, when he had "grown out" of his
Secessionist period, were Italian and French
Impressionists, amongst whom the most influential was
Claude Monet. In his prime, Jama was essentially a landscape painter. Even the illustrations and commissioned portraits that he produced at the start of his artistic career feature
vedute. In his later period, Jama worked together with other Slovene impressionists, in particular with
Rihard Jakopič, with whom he worked in
Donji Čemehovec and
Kraljevec na Sutli. It was at this time that Jama began to study light and became a true impressionist. In this last period of Slovene impressionism, he painted first and foremost with
watercolour, but he gave this up around 1900 and devoted himself to painting using
oil on canvas. He produced the majority of his best-known works with this technique, which he used until the end of his life. ==Selected paintings==