After a brief stay in London, he travelled to Paris in order to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under the Romanticist Paul Delaroche.

An Illustrated London News obituary describes a fourteen-year stay at the French artist colony of Barbizon, but this is not attested in other biographies.

It was ultimately not included within the House, but exhibited across much of the United Kingdom during the early 1850s, and was later donated to the Pilgrim Hall Museum.

[5] A now-lost painting by Lucy, depicting the Pilgrim's arrival at Plymouth Rock, served the basis for a heavily circulated engraving produced c. 1850.

His Nelson meditating in the cabin of the Victory previously to the battle of Trafalgar was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854, before being sold to Robert Peel the following year.

[2] He was plagued with health problems in his later years, and died at Notting Hill in London on 18 May 1873, leaving behind a number of unfinished commissions.