Henry Farny

Henry François Farny (15 July 1847 Ribeauvillé – 23 December 1916) was a French-born United States painter and illustrator. His work was centered on the life of Native Americans in the 19th-century United States.

Farny's family left France in 1853 to emigrate to the United States. The family moved to Warren in Pennsylvania, near a Seneca reservation. As a child he learned the lore of the woods from Seneca Indians, who came from their reservation in New York state to hunt in the neighborhood where his father lived. In his boyhood he was fond of covering the walls of his father's board-house with pictures of animals, birds and Indians, which he scratched with nails or framed by aid of burnt sticks.

Around 1859, the Farny family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio. Attracted by painting and drawing, the young man became an illustrator for magazines and books for children. When he was 18 years old, Harper's Weekly published a double page view of Cincinnati he made.

Between 1867 and 1870 he took private lessons from Albert Bierstadt in Düsseldorf. By the time Farny had arrived at Düsseldorf, and began attending Düsseldorf academy in the late 1860s the Düsseldorf school of painting had already begun to lose its once high acclaim amongst most of the American populace.

One part of America where this was not the case was in Cincinnati, Ohio where the realist objectives taught there were still being held in high esteem. Despite this, upon his return to Cincinnati in 1870 Farny, who had been studying abroad, came home to a minimally responsive demand by Cincinnatians for his paintings. He used his new found skills in the service of poster painting and other odd jobs. In 1873 this all changed when he was commissioned by the chamber of commerce to depict in drawing the different stages of pork packing in Cincinnati.

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