Enoch Wood Perry was born in Boston on July 31, 1831, and was one of four children.

Perry’s father (also Enoch Wood Perry) made and sold grates and fenders used in fireplaces for a living. It would have been hot and dirty work; this might be why Perry looked toward art as a way to make a living instead. His father lost the business during the panic of 1837 (a financial crisis that set off a major depression), and then moved the family to New Orleans. Apparently, the panic didn’t hit the family that hard, as Perry Sr. soon opened a hardware and home furnishings store in their new city.

After graduating from high school, the younger Perry worked as a clerk at the firm of Pickett, Perkins, and Company. During this time, it’s possible that he supplemented his income by painting. If true, he soon decided he wanted to improve his skills and study at a European Academy; all of the cool kids were doing it. Perry chose the Düsseldorf Academy and left America in 1852. He enrolled and reportedly studied with Emanuel Leutze for a time (many people don’t know Leutze by name, but most do know his most famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware).

After spending about two and a half years in Düsseldorf, Perry moved on to Paris, where he continued to hone his painting skills, this time studying in the studio of Thomas Couture. During the intervening years since Perry’s departure for Europe, his father also must have come up in the world, as he was now a big muckety-muck with political connections. He had been the chairman for the Louisiana State Central Democratic Committee, and he now used his contacts to ask for Perry Jr. to be appointed as the United States consul in Venice. He actually got the job and spent his time there sketching, painting, and hanging out with other artists like Albert Bierstadt, William Page, and Thomas Crawford, among others.

Perry returned to America in 1858 and made his home in Philadelphia, where he had his first exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as at the Boston Athenaeum, and the National Academy of Design. Never one to sit still for long, he soon packed up and moved back to New Orleans, where he began painting portraits in his own studio. A couple of his first clients there include John Slidell (Louisiana senator), and Jefferson Davis. In 1862, he made another move, this time to San Francisco, where he also mainly painted portraits. From there, he made a trip to the Yosemite Valley with Bierstadt, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, and others; the trip produced Cathedral Rock, and Vernal Falls, Yosemite Valley, likely influenced by Bierstadt’s monumental landscapes.

During this time, Perry also started to do genre paintings, which is what he became known for, much more so than his portraits or landscape works. Genre painting dates back to 17^th century Holland, and generally refers to scenes of everyday life, whether that was workers in a field, or drinkers in a tavern. Perry’s genre paintings centered on rural, folksy type scenes, whose subjects have been described as “hardworking and moral citizens whose ‘simple, yet honorable activities’ contributed to the growth of their developing nation.”

Nineteenth century American artists liked to paint farmers in genre scenes, as William Sidney Mount did with Bargaining for a Horse, and Perry would do the same with Inside a Barn, or Talking It Over, where he took the unusual step of using the images of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as farmers chatting outside of a barn. Other paintings were also a little different, such as The True American, where all of the faces of the subjects are hidden.

Perry continued to travel and live in different places, including the Sandwich Islands, Salt Lake City, New York, San Francisco again, and finally, back to New York (with regular trips to Europe), where he died in 1915.