Born in Hagerstown, Maryland, of Swedish descent, on November 13, 1857, Fernand Lungren was raised in Toledo, Ohio.

He showed an early talent for drawing but his father induced him to pursue a professional career and in 1874 entered the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to study mining engineering.

[1] At the age of 19, and following a dispute with his father, Lungren was finally permitted to enrol at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and Robert Frederick Blum (1857–1903).

Among the members of the club were William Merritt Chase, J. Carroll Beckwith, John Twachtman, Winslow Homer, J. Alden Weir, and Robert Frederick Blum.

During his stay, he exhibited some of his views of the American desert and produced a number of images of London street life.

During their three-year stay, Lungren became highly skilled at the use of pastel, a chalk-like colored drawing medium, exhibiting the results with success.

Lungren met many prominent artists in London, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, with whom the couple became good friends.

[12] In the same period, Fernand Lungren authored the illustrations of three books by the American nature writer Stewart Edward White, i.e.

The Mountains (1904), The Pass - Mountaineering Through the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries (1906) and Camp and Trail (1907), based on the experience he had acquired when staying and painting in New Mexico and Arizona, while, in return, Stewart Edward White wrote the foreword for the first Fernand Lungren biography written by John A. Berger and published in 1936 (Schauer Press, Santa Barbara, CA).

[17] Art historians have suggested that he was largely responsible for establishing desert scenery as a subject worthy of exploration.