Fery, John 1859 - 1934
Born in Austria, John Fery earned a strong reputation for dramatic paintings of western mountain landscape in the United States. Glacier National Park in northwest Montana was a popular subject for him. He was raised in a prominent, wealthy family that lived on an estate about nineteen miles northeast of Salzburg. His mother was Hungarian, and his father was born in Bohemia. Some sources have written that he studied art in Dusseldorf, Germany with Peter Jansen, and also in Munich, Venice and Karlsruhe.
By 1903, Fery was in Milwaukee where he stayed until 1911, when he moved to St. Paul, Minnesota until 1918. His greatest patron became Louis Hill, owner of the Great Northern Railway and a resident of St. Paul. Hill commissioned Fery to paint scenes of Glacier Park and other scenic landscapes for placement in their hotels and railroad stations. Over the years the Railroad purchased a total of 362 works, and many of these paintings were large-scale, panoramas. In 1914, after several years of painting in Glacier Park, Fery did a series of about twelve oil paintings of Yellowstone for advertising purposes for the Northern Pacific Railroad. About 150 of his paintings have been found after his death, and the largest group are of Glacier National Park, but some are from California, Arizona and New Mexico and Wisconsin. One is from Venice, Italy and one from Bavaria. Fery passed away in Everett, Washington in 1934.
