Brought up in Ashtabula County, Ohio, where his family had moved in 1841, John Henry Dolph left home at age fourteen, after the death of his mother. With a friend from Columbus, he did decorative painting on coaches and carriages. In 1855 he began a three-year period of study in Cleveland with Allen Smith and took up the practice of portrait painting. He also spent time in Detroit and Chicago in search of commissions, until in 1863 he left the Midwest for New York.
He turned to painting landscapes and genre scenes, gradually narrowing to a specialty in farmyard genre and animal life. This interest led him in 1870 to Antwerp, where he studied with Louis van Kuyck, a noted horse painter. Back in New York by 1872, Dolph found his farm scenes exciting little interest, so in 1880 he sold his studio contents and again left for Europe. This time he went to Paris, where he studied for two years to improve his figure-painting skills. During this period, he also visited Rome.
Back in New York once more, Dolph turned to painting portraits, medieval genre scenes, and architectural studies. However, his work in these themes did not sell as well as another type of painting that he had begun in the 1870s: pictures of cats. Realizing that these provided a guaranteed income, Dolph in the end worked almost exclusively as the "leading cat-painter of America" ("Felines and Canines," 230).
Dolph was a fairly active member of the New York art scene. He helped organize the Society of American Artists, although he resigned from the organization in 1884. An inveterate participant in Academy annual exhibitions, he missed only two between 1864 and the year of his death, both occasions when he was abroad. Toward the end of his life, he divided his time between a Sherwood Building studio in Manhattan and a country home on Long Island.
