Harney was an early student of artist Alban Jasper Conant, a painter of Abraham Lincoln, and also of James Reeve Stuart, an itinerant Southern aristocratic portrait artist.

[7][8] Harney settled in Alton, Illinois and taught as a member of the faculty at Shurtleff College[9] After twenty years as both faculty and as Shurtleff's Director of Art, he moved to the Missouri side of the Mississippi River along with his wife Emma Stewart and his three children (his son Eliot had died while still in Alton).

Particularly in the genre of portrait painting, (for which Harney was popular and adept), the dark, muted, earthy palette of the Munich School is evident.

At the turn of the century Harney was called to New York to do some work on some paintings that were executed by Alban Jasper Conant.

The St. Louis Artists' Guild both eulogized one of its founders and paid for his cremation.