SELMA — An early morning fire that left the family home of artist John Lapsley in ashes is under investigation.

“We’re writing it up as a suspicious fire,” Selma Fire Chief Mike Stokes said. “The state fire marshal’s office has been called.”

Nobody was injured in the fire that began about 2 a.m. Friday morning on the corner of McCleod Avenue and Church Street. Authorities said nobody lived in the house.

All the fire department’s units were called out. Police cleared the street of cars to allow the units to set up. Officers with the police department went door-to-door; waking up neighbors on all sides of the house in the event an evacuation was needed later.

Stokes said no other property was damaged as a result of the fire. Firefighters wetted down roofs of houses near the property to battle the hot ashes that rose in a cloud of smoke tens of feet above treetops and rooftops.

Neighbors, many of them dressed in bath robes, gathered on the sidewalk across the street from and in the adjacent block to watch the fire department spray thousands of gallons of water on the burning structure, which was made of wood and had an interior of mostly heart pine.

The house was constructed in the late 1880s or early 1890s, said Nancy Bennett, first vice president of the Selma-Dallas County Historic Preservation Society Inc.

“It is a loss,” she said. “It’s just one more vacant lot.”

The house was the family home of the artist John Lapsley, who was born in 1915 in Selma. Lapsley attended art school at the National Academy of Design in New York.

Early in his career, he traveled to Mexico to meet Diego Rivera and David Siqueios and study their murals. The work of Jean Charlot, a French painter and illustrator, who spent an extensive period of his life working in Mexico, had already influenced him.

Lapsley came back to Selma in World War II and became an illustrator at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, where he worked until his retirement in 1960. He once took a sabbatical from the base work to teach art at Auburn University.

After retirement, Lapsley settled in his home in Selma, using the yellow structure on the corner behind the house as a studio. In later years, he painted in the house, although some people recalled seeing Lapsley set up on various corners around town, painting.

His work is still sold in private galleries across the nation. None of his artwork was in the house when it burned, Bennett said.

Lapsley died in 2005.