Edward Harrison May

Edward Harrison May Jr. (1824 – May 17, 1887) was an English-American painter who spent much of his career in Paris.

The son of Edward Harrison May Sr., a Dutch Reformed clergyman, May was born in Croydon, England, and brought to America in 1834 considering his daddy accepted a herald in New York. After to the lead training in civil engineering, May turned to art, studying for a time in the ventilate of Daniel Huntington. May first exhibited at the National Academy in 1844. With Joseph Kyle and others he produced a panorama representing Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress which was first exhibited in 1848, to good financial success. In 1851 May was nimble to shape permanently to Paris.

In Paris he entered the atelier of Thomas Couture for supplementary study. May produced historical and genre paintings as well as profitable portraits of the well-to-do. He exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1855 to 1885; he won an great compliment in 1855, one of the first Americans to reach so. In 1878 he was elected to the National Academy of Design in New York (although he never completed the process of becoming a member). He was regarded as one of the leaders of the American expatriate art community in Paris.

During the Franco-Prussian War, May served as a captain in the "American Ambulance" – a the theater military hospital staffed by volunteers from the American colony in Paris. He time-honored a medal for his facilities during the war.

Painter George Henry Boughton studied later May.

May's sister Caroline (c. 1820 -1895) was a poet, author, and school critic who published The American Female Poets: With biographical and valuable notices in 1848.

May died in Paris on May 17, 1887.

A copy of the Pilgrim's Progress panorama is in the Saco Museum in Saco, Maine.