John Fery

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. 
 
He visited Yellowstone Park in 1891, and indicated in his writings that he had been there even earlier. From 1892 to 1893, he led European nobility on hunting expeditions to the American Northwest, made possible by the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. The group's itinerary included Lake Michigan, Arizona with the Grand Canyon, New Mexico, California, Oregon and Wyoming. In 1895, he led a second expedition, and these ventures launched his career as a painter of the American West.
 
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.  In 1914, he worked for the Northern Pacific and the Santa Fe Railroads and working for other national parks including Yellowstone and Zion and he painted a number of paintings in Utah.

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. Most of the paintings are in private collections but the Burlington Northern Railway, successor to the Great Northern Railway, has work by Fery in the collection as does the Church of the Latter Day Saints Museum in Salt Lake City.