Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. was born in Boston in 1831. He was a genre, landscape, and portrait painter who enjoyed success in Salt Lake City as portraitist for the leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He died in 1915 in New York.

In 1852 Perry began study in Düsseldorf with Emmanuel Leutze and then went to Paris to study with Thomas Couture. He spent the remaining years of the 1850s as U.S. Consul in Vienna. He returned to the United States at end of the decade.

In 1866 he was in Salt Lake City painting a series of portraits of Brigham Young and other dignitaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Although he was a successful portrait painter, Perry was best known for his genre paintings. The True American(1875) featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art permanent collection is an example.

Biography adapted from Artists of Utah. 

Enoch W. Perry was born in Boston in 1831 and died in 1915. He originally trained as a painter in New Orleans, Louisiana from 1848-1852. In the early 1850s, he went to work in Dusseldorf, Germany, with the famed Emmanuel Leutze, painter of the well-known Washington Crossing the Delaware. Perry studied in Paris under Thomas Couture, an artist much less concerned with strict linearity of approach than Leutze; the young man spent the remaining years of the 1850s in Venice as U.S. Consul. Returning to the U.S. at the end of this period, Perry made the decision to seek his artistic fortune in the Far West. Traveling to California in 1862, the painter then settled on the Pacific Coast until 1866, making a number of painting tours through the Rockies and farther west to Hawaii on several occasions. Working in portraiture, landscape, and genre, Perry did not achieve the highest levels in the development of his art, though such distinctions were certainly not made by his pleased patrons in California or in Utah. Perry also painted landscapes with Albert Bierstadt in Yosemite Park before moving east into a Utah artistic sojourn. To George Ottinger's chagrin, Perry sold $11,000 worth of portraits (L.D.S. and Salt Lake City Collections) and landscapes to eager Salt Lakers in a period of a little over four months around 1865, while Ottinger, “the Utahn,“ was struggling in the same pursuit just for the basic necessities.

Biography courtesy Artists of Utah.

Books

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Periodicals

Leeds, Valerie Ann. "Collection of John and Dolores Beck." American Art Review, December 2000.

Saville, Jennifer. "Hawaii and Its People." American Art Review, June 2001.

Wallis, Stephen. "The Quiet Americans." Art & Auction, November 2000.