Edward Lamson Henry led a long and successful career, working in a variety of modes, from genre to portraiture and landscape. Born in Charleston, South Carolina, he studied and worked in Europe during a trip beginning in 1860, and settled later in New York. His rise to commercial and critical success was relatively rapid, joining the National Academy at the young age of 26 . He kept his studio in the prestigious Tenth Street Studio Building, and exhibited his work almost every year at the National Academy and the Century Association until his death in 1919. While he retained a craftsman’s commitment to his own very high standards, he also held a broad taste for artwork in other styles, admiring the work of Manet and others of a more vanguard aesthetic. In an unpublished monograph on her husband, Frances Livingston Henry wrote:

Nothing annoyed him more than to see a wheel, a bit of architecture, etc. carelessly drawn or out of keeping with the time it was supposed to portray [as quoted by Elizabeth McCausland in Edward Lamson Henry, NA, (1945), p. 340].

Such was his commitment to accuracy of historical pictures that Henry became renowned as an archivist of vanishing American life. Upon his death in 1919, the New York Evening Post appreciated Henry:

Few American artists … have better served their country in preserving for the future the quaint and provincial aspects of a life which has all but disappeared [Ibid., p. 65].