Ole Peter Hansen Balling was an unusual person, especially for his time, in that he played a major and pivotal role in the self-definition of the United States in the wake of the Civil War, but spent fewer than twenty years living there.

The artist was born to Karen Poulsdatter and Johan Fredrik Hansen, a shoemaker, in 1823 in Christiania, which is now Oslo. Balling was briefly a student of Ferdinand Gjøs, and then he became a decorative painter, serving as an apprentice to Jakob Emilius Wunderlich from 1832-41. From 1843-45, he studied at Universität der Künste Berlin, which also produced the artists Günter Grass, Kathrin Sonntag, Li Hua, and Kim Yusob. In 1848, for two years, Balling was a volunteer Norwegian officer in the Schleswig-Holstein war, known in Denmark as the "three years war." 

Balling took the names Ole Peter and Hansen after his stepfather and father in 1848. The practice of naming oneself after one's immediate ancestors repeats a Talmudic practice which reasons that ancestor's names are energetically protected by the deeds of the ancestor, in contrast to the Biblical view that duplicating a name was dangerous.

In New York City, Balling installed work at the Metropolitan bank and the Church of St. Mary. While he was living in Mexico, he installed at a center for the blind in Mexico City. He also installed, at the Marine Museum in Horten, Norway, portraits of 30 Norwegian naval officers, 4 Swedish-Norwegian kings and a self-portrait. He painted all of these works between 1875 and 1879! If he was born in a different time, Warhol would have hired him.