Frederic Vinton spent his adolescencein Chicago before moving to Boston in 1861. There he spent four years working in mercantile firms and nearly a decade as a bookkeeper in two banks. On the side, he studied at the Lowell Institute with William Rimmer and wrote art criticism for the Boston Advertiser. In 1875 he traveled to Paris for a season of study under L‚on Bonnat. The following year he spent in Munich with Frank Duveneck, but disagreement with German methods brought him back to Paris. Jean-Paul Laurens served as his teacher for the next two years.
Reestablishing himself in Boston in autumn 1878, Vinton opened a portrait studio. He traveled to Europe occasionally--to Spain in 1882 with William M. Chase and Robert Blum and throughout the continent for eighteen months following his marriage to Annie M. Pierce in 1888. Vinton was not a frequent contributor to Academy Annuals; in 1886 he was temporarily dropped from the list of Associates for failing to exhibit. Following his death, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston mounted a retrospective of his portraits and landscapes in 1911.
