John Fery
1859-1934
Winter Day
oil on canvas
signed lower right: J. Fery
21 3/4 x 36 in., Frame: 31 x 45 1/2 x 2 5/8 in.

Provenance:
Collection of William P. Healey, Jackson, WY
Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, July 2019, Lot 23
From a Private Collection

Literature:
Larry Len Peterson, John Fery: Artist of Glacier National Park & The American West, The Coeur d’Alene Art Auction: Hayden, ID, 2015, illustrated p. 176.

John Fery’s images of Jackson Lake, the Tetons, elk country, and Yellowstone emerge from a formative period in the making of both the artist and the American West. Born Johann Nepomuk Levy in Austria in 1859, Fery trained in Europe before immigrating to the United States and building a reputation as a painter of dramatic mountain scenery. His first sustained encounters with the western landscape came through hunting excursions in the Northwest during the early 1890s, when he accompanied European nobles and painted along the way.

By the late 1890s, Fery had made Jackson Lake, Wyoming, his base of operations. According to Peter C. Merrill’s account of the artist, he regarded Jackson Lake as the most beautiful body of water he had ever seen. He and his family lived in a cabin near the lake, at a time when Jackson Hole remained difficult to reach, thinly settled, and far removed from the tourism economy that later came to define it. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was working in an environment where travel was slow, weather was consequential, and the surrounding wildlife was a visible part of daily life.

That turn-of-the-century residence helps explain the depth and familiarity of Fery’s Jackson Lake paintings. The works are not the product of a brief sightseeing stop. They reflect repeated observation of the lake, the shifting views of the Tetons, the forest margins, and the movement of elk and deer through the country. The paintings portray a landscape that Fery knew as both a hunter and a working artist: a place of changing light, seasonal weather, solitude, and immense geographic scale. His scenes of wildlife are therefore more than decorative additions to a mountain view. They suggest the rhythms of a place where animals, water, and forest were inseparable elements of the environment.

Jackson Hole in Fery’s day was still in the early stages of transition. Ranchers, homesteaders, trappers, guides, and a growing number of eastern visitors all moved through the valley. Travel remained demanding. The Snake River’s braided channels could be difficult and dangerous to cross, and early crossings such as Bill Menor’s ferry were essential to movement through the region. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the area’s growing appeal to “dudes,” tourists, and sportsmen existed alongside the realities of settlement and subsistence.

Fery’s work belongs to this moment before the Tetons were fully absorbed into the national-park and destination-tourism identity familiar today. Grand Teton National Park did not yet exist when he was living near Jackson Lake. The artist’s canvases consequently preserve an earlier imaginative version of the valley: not untouched in a literal sense, but still experienced as a lightly inhabited wilderness.

In 1910, Louis W. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, recruited Fery for the company’s ambitious “See America First” campaign. Hill wanted large, dramatic paintings and photographs that could hang in ticket agencies, railroad depots, public buildings, fairs, and expositions, thereby persuading Americans to travel west to Glacier National Park. Great Northern supplied Fery with a studio, rail pass, living allowance, Glacier accommodations, and a salary.

From 1910 to 1913, Fery produced large, highly finished views of Glacier’s lakes, waterfalls, glaciers, and peaks for display in Great Northern stations, offices, hotels, and promotional venues. The paintings were designed to make a distant landscape immediate and desirable: their sweeping scale, heightened color, and dramatic mountain forms promised prospective travelers an American wilderness as grand as any in Europe. Fery’s Glacier canvases did not simply illustrate the railroad’s route; they helped establish the visual identity of Glacier National Park for a national audience.

The Great Northern commission was commercial, but it was also a major cultural project. Fery’s Glacier paintings carried the visual lessons he had developed in Wyoming to a far broader public, transforming remote western scenery into a compelling national destination. The railroad could deliver travelers to Glacier, but Fery’s art supplied the imaginative journey that made them want to go.

The Yellowstone pictures extend the same broader railroad-era sensibility. Fery painted a Yellowstone group for the Northern Pacific Railroad, rather than for Great Northern, underscoring how railroads competed to transform western scenery into a compelling reason to travel.

The painting appears to be in good condition with faint craquelure throughout and faint stretcher bar indentations around the perimeter. The painting was viewed under blacklight and shows scattered areas of inpainting throughout. The frame appears to be in good condition with small chips at the lower left and upper and lower right corners.