[1] In 1860 he went to Paris, where he studied with Charles Gleyre and Gustave Courbet,[2] at roughly the same time as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley.

He was best known for themes involving transportation, especially railroads, but also stage coach and canal boat journeys, among other means, all rendered in minute detail.

[3] In 1884, Henry and his wife Frances Livingston Wells moved to the town of Cragsmoor in the Shawangunk Mountains of Upstate New York where they helped to found an artists' colony.

[3] Henry's "historical fictions" often portrayed an idyllic and agrarian America, one relatively unperturbed by Civil War or by the growing phenomena of industrialization, urbanization and immigration that were taking place during the period in which he painted.

Art professor William T. Oedel wrote of his legacy, "Perhaps no artist played so consistently and so durably to the American cult of nostalgia in the last quarter of the 19th century as Edward Lamson Henry.