Austrian-born John Fery is best known for his dramatic landscapes of the American West. Raised in a prominent, aristocratic family on an estate near Salzburg, Fery studied art in Vienna, Dusseldorf, and also in Munich before immigrating to the United States in the mid 1880s. He settled in the German community in Milwaukee and brought his family in 1886.

An early interest in the American wilderness led Fery to conduct hunting expeditions for European nobility to the Pacific Northwest from 1892 to 1893, made possible by the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad. While traveling and painting in the Rocky Mountains, Fery impressed members of the Hill family, developers of the railroad, who commissioned him to paint pictures evoking the drama and beauty of the region, particularly Glacier National Park. Over the years the family purchased a total of 362 works by Fery, many of them large-scale panoramas, which hung in station houses, hotels, and lodges served by the railroad.

An itinerant painter, Fery seems never to have settled in one place for very long, living intermittently in Oregon, California, Arizona, Utah, Minnesota, Montana, and Everett Washington, where he worked for the Oregon Journal. One of the artist's most important contributions was aiding in the creation of Glacier National Park, promoting travel through the appeal of his paintings of the region.

Exhibited: World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago), 1893; California State Fair, 1893; Milwaukee Public Library, 1974 and Boise Gallery, 1975 (retrospectives)