Jean Emmanuel Locher was a Swiss painter and etcher.

Locher was born in 1769 in Fribourg, the son of Gottfried Locher, a painter from Mengen, and his wife Marie-Françoise Rotzer. Like his brother François (1765-1799), he received his artistic training in his father's studio. He is known to have worked on his father's altarpieces and frescoes. After leaving his father's workshop, he turned, like most of his colleagues, to gouached outline etchings of Swiss traditional costumes. He also worked as a portrait and miniature painter. Around 1820, a series of his portraits, Recueil des portraits suisses des 22 cantons, was published.

In 1811, Jean Emmanuel Locher painted the altarpiece with Karl Borromäus for the church of St. Charles of the RR. PP. Cordeliers in Fribourg in the tradition of his father as a church painter, but already in the style of classicism. Locher is less well known as a painter of votive paintings for the chapels of Mariahilf in Düdingen or Loreto near Fribourg i.Üe.