John Fery: The Painter Minnesota Forgot, and the Spelling That Hides Him

He painted murals in Duluth, lived in St. Paul, and turned out 347 canvases for the Great Northern Railway's 'See America First' campaign. The best of his Glacier Park oils reach five figures, though most Ferys sell for far less. Most people misspell his name — which is exactly how these paintings stay undiscovered in Minnesota houses.

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There is a particular kind of painting that hangs quietly in Minnesota houses: a wide mountain landscape, a lake in the foreground doubling the peaks above it, dark evergreens framing the edges. It is usually large. It is usually dark with a century of varnish and furnace soot. And the signature in the lower right, if anyone has ever looked at it closely, reads Fery.

Not Ferry. Fery. One R.

That single letter is why so many of these paintings sit unrecognized. Type "John Ferry" into a search box and you will find a living painter in Kansas City who works in oil on panel. Type "John Fery" and you will find an Austrian-born landscape painter who spent the most productive years of his career on the Great Northern Railway's payroll, working out of a studio in St. Paul.

The second one is probably the painting on your wall.

The Minnesota years

John Fery was born Johann Nepomuk Levy in Strasswalchen, Austria, in 1859, and emigrated to the United States in 1886. His training is genuinely disputed — the galleries repeat that he studied at the Vienna, Munich and Düsseldorf academies, but the scholar Peter C. Merrill found no enrollment records at any of them, and Coeur d'Alene Galleries independently notes that his name does not appear in the registers of the major art schools. The likeliest version, given the sophistication of the work, is private instruction rather than academy training — and an academy story that grew in the retelling.

What is not disputed is where he worked.

By around 1890 he was painting murals in Duluth, including work for the Fitger Brewery. Two decades later, in 1911, he moved to St. Paul, and stayed there through the rest of the decade (sources give 1917 or 1918 for his departure). That was not a coincidence of geography. The Great Northern Railway was headquartered in St. Paul, and its president, Louis W. Hill, had put Fery on salary — roughly $200 a month, plus a studio and lodging — to paint the American West for the railroad's "See America First" campaign.

The arrangement produced one of the more astonishing production records in American landscape painting. By September 1913, Fery had delivered 347 paintings to the Great Northern — the railroad is recorded as having bought 362 of his works in total. From a start around 1910–11, that is on the order of ten large canvases a month, sustained for years.

These were not gallery pictures. They were advertising. They hung in depots, ticket offices and park lodges from coast to coast — in twenty-five states, two Canadian provinces, the District of Columbia, and Berlin — and their job was to make a traveller in a waiting room want to buy a ticket to Glacier National Park. That is why they are enormous, why they are panoramic, and why they are composed to be read from thirty feet away.

Why the paintings scattered

Two events explain why Fery canvases turn up in private hands rather than in institutions.

The first is a fire at his Orcas Island, Washington studio in 1929, which destroyed a large body of work. Roughly 150 paintings are commonly said to survive — against a career output that ran to several hundred, the Great Northern commission alone accounting for 347 by 1913. Whatever the exact denominator, the survival rate is low, and that is worth holding onto: when a great many "Ferys" appear on the market at once, scrutiny is warranted.

The second is simply that the railroad's paintings were institutional property that outlived the institution. Depots closed. Lodges were remodelled. Canvases came off walls and went home with employees, or to auction, or into the trade. Glacier Park Inc. eventually donated twenty-one historic paintings from 1909–1915 back to the National Park Service on condition they remain in the lodges — but plenty had already dispersed.

What they are worth

This is a bifurcated market, and the gap between its two halves is the single most important thing a Minnesota family should understand.

At the top, large oil-on-canvas Glacier National Park subjects sold to Western-art specialists have brought serious money at the Coeur d'Alene Art Auction:

And then the one that tells you the most about who is bidding:

A fourteen-by-twenty-two-inch panel with elk in it made more than a canvas nearly three times its area without them, and landed within reach of pictures far larger again. On the results we can see, animals in the composition appear to be worth real money — elk, moose and bear pull in the Western-art buyer, who is a different and deeper-pocketed collector than the generic landscape buyer. It is a pattern rather than a law, but it is a consistent one.

Meanwhile the aggregate data tells the other half of the story: across several hundred tracked lots, the twelve-month average result sits under $6,000. Small oil-on-board studies at generalist regional houses have topped out around $4,500. A 40 × 60 Fery canvas offered at a Twin Cities house in 2022 carried an estimate of $4,000–$8,000 — a picture that size, correctly titled and placed in front of Western-art collectors, would have carried an estimate several times that.

Venue and title are worth more than size. That is not a sales pitch; it is what the results say.

What drives the number

In rough order of importance:

  1. A named Glacier location. Lake McDonald, Iceberg Lake, St. Mary's Lake, Chief Mountain, Going-to-the-Sun — these command a hard premium. "Mountain landscape" trades at a fraction of the same canvas with its title restored. If you have any family paper, any old label, any note on the stretcher that names the lake, it is worth money.
  2. Animals. See above — on the evidence, wildlife in the picture punches well above the canvas size.
  3. The Great Northern years, roughly 1910 to the late 1910s — which is to say the St. Paul years.
  4. Provenance to the railroad or to a Glacier lodge. Documented, this is a genuine value driver.
  5. Size — which helps, but does not dominate the way people expect.

Looking at one properly

There is no catalogue raisonné for Fery and no formal authentication body. The standard reference is Larry Len Peterson's John Fery: Artist of Glacier National Park & the American West. Beyond that, examination comes down to the object.

The support. Mostly oil on canvas; a meaningful minority on board or panel, generally the smaller works.

The stretcher and tacking edges. These paintings were architectural. Many were installed to fit a specific wall and later cut down or re-stretched when a building changed hands. Cut tacking edges are common and they matter — an original six-by-twelve-foot panorama reduced to a saleable forty-by-sixty is a different object, and a different value proposition, from an untouched canvas.

The surface. Decades in unclimatized depots, hotel lobbies and lodges — many of them with fireplaces — means heavy grime, nicotine and soot film, and discoloured varnish are the norm rather than the exception. This is one of the categories where cleaning can produce a dramatic result. It is also one where cleaning should be done by a conservator and not by anybody with a bottle of anything.

The paint film. Fery worked fast. Nine to fourteen large canvases a month leaves thinly worked passages, particularly in skies, and drying cracks are not unusual.

Slack canvas. The very large works, unlined, tend toward corner draws and planar distortion. Expect it; price it in.

One honest caution: his Glacier images were made as advertising and were reproduced by the Great Northern in promotional material. We have not been able to document a specific line of Fery calendar prints or later giclées circulating as originals — but given the scale of the "See America First" campaign, any unusually flat, evenly textured "Fery" deserves a hard look under magnification before anyone gets excited.

If you have one

The paintings that leave Minnesota for the Western-art salerooms tend to be the ones somebody bothered to identify first. The ones that sell for a few hundred dollars are usually the ones catalogued as "mountain landscape, indistinctly signed."

If there is a large landscape in the family — from a Duluth house, a St. Paul house, a lake place, or inherited from someone who worked for the railroad — it costs nothing to have it looked at. What we would want to see: the signature, the back of the canvas, the stretcher, any labels, and whatever the family remembers about where it came from. Photographs are usually enough for a first opinion.

Fery is one of a small group of names — David A. Maass is another — where a Minnesota connection and a national specialist market meet, and where the gap between a lazy catalogue entry and a careful one is measured in thousands of dollars. Paintings are one of our core departments and we handle American and Western pictures out of Twin Cities estates regularly, and part of the job is knowing when a picture belongs in one of our sales and when it belongs in front of a specialist audience somewhere else. On a painting like this, that judgment is the difference between four figures and five.

If you would like an opinion on a landscape you have inherited, ask us for a free estimate — no obligation, and no charge for a first look.