Severin Gabriel Falkman was a Swedish-born painter who worked in Finland. He made paintings symbolizing various disciplines in the library of the University of Helsinki, in which he used only shades of gray and brown . He was a forerunner of Karelianism and made a trip to Eastern Finland, where he photographed people and ethnographic objects and wrote the book I Östra Finland (1885, in Eastern Finland).

Falkman's parents were Hans Johan Falkman (b. 1855), a merchant from Helsinki, and Sofia Holmberg. His sister was opera singer Hanna Sofia Falkman , who married Alexander Wilhelm Brummer (1826–1908) in 1855. They were born in Sweden and moved to Finland with their parents in the 1840s. Falkman attended the Helsinki Private Lyceum and became a student in 1850.

Falkman was one of the first students of the Finnish Art Association's school of drawing in 1848. He studied art in Paris from 1857 to 1861 and made an art study trip to Paris, Rome and Munich from 1863 to 1870. Before finally settling in Finland in 1870, he worked for seven years in Rome from 1864 to 1870.