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Enoch Wood Perry

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Artist's Biography

Enoch Wood Perry developed the ambition to become a painter while working in his father's New Orleans hardware store.  In the middle 1850s, he was able to arrange to study with Emanuel Leutze and Worthington Whittredge in Düsseldorf and Thomas Couture in Paris.  He developed into a competent portrait painter, while also trying his hand at landscape and genre painting.  During the Civil War, he came to California and accompanied his old friend Albert Bierstadt to Yosemite in the summer of 1863.  He then traveled to Hawaii where he painted portraits of the royal family and genre scenes of local customs.  In late 1865, he settled in Salt Lake City and painted a suite of portraits of Mormon Church leaders, including Brigham Young, now in the Church Museum, Salt Lake City.  Back in New York in the late 1860s, he concentrated on portraits and genre, becoming noted for beautiful vignettes of American life in the spirit of William Sidney Mount and Francis Edmonds.  Elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design, he was a faithful participant in N.A.D. exhibitions.  In the late 1870s, he returned to San Francisco and maintained a studio here for several years painting genre scenes of Eastern subjects.  After 1881, he settled in New York City for the rest of his long life, continuing to send paintings to National Academy exhibitions.  In 1902, he exhibited a painting titled "Home of the Hermit Thrush," that may have been a wood interior similar to our work of 1904.  Called "Wood" by his friends, Perry may have considered this subject to have had some kind of personal significance.  Our charming work explores the beauty and mystery of the forest.  A creek zigzags through the foreground bringing flashes of blue sky reflections down into a scene dominated by earth tones.