Edward Lamson Henry

Edward Lamson Henry (January 12, 1841 – May 9, 1919), commonly known as E.L. Henry, was an American genre painter, born in Charleston, South Carolina.

Though born in Charleston, by age seven his parents had died and Henry moved to live with cousins in New York City. He began studying painting, there and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1860 he went to Paris, where he studied with Charles Gleyre and Gustave Courbet, at roughly the same time as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley.

In 1862, he returned to the United States, where he served as a clerk on a Union transport ship in the American Civil War. After the war he resumed his painting, with many works inspired by his experiences in the war. He moved into the prestigious Tenth Street Studio Building in Greenwich Village, where Winslow Homer also had a studio. In 1869, Henry was elected to the National Academy of Design, New York.

As a painter of colonial and early American themes and incidents of rural life, he displays a quaint humor. Among his best-known compositions are some of early railroad travel, incidents of stage coach and canal boat journeys, rendered with much detail on a minute scale.

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