Everett Warner spent the years of his teens in Washington, D.C., after his father, a lawyer, scientist, and author, became an examiner for the Bureau of Pensions. He studied at the Corcoran Art School and at the Washington Art Students League under Edmund Clarence Messer, Hobart Nichols and Wells Sawyer in the 1890s and developed a proficiency at watercolor and pastel. He was employed for a time in a department store but then, at the age of eighteen, began writing art criticism for the [Washington] Evening Star. The latter experience brought him into contact with many of the artists living and working in Washington at the time and took him, as correspondent, to art colonies such as Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he began spending his summers. There, he came under the influence of American Impressionists such as John Twachtman. At the same time, he began exhibiting at the Washington Water Color Society, where he won the Corcoran Prize in 1901, and investigating the art of engraving.
In 1900, Warner moved to New York where he enrolled in the Art Students League. George Bridgeman and Walter Clark were among his teachers there. He participated in the exhibitions of the Society of American Fakirs in 1901 and 1902. In 1903, he began sending works to the National Academy's annuals.
Early that same year, Warner took an extended trip to Europe. In Paris, he enrolled at the Academie Julian, took a studio with Harry Hoffman and Arthur Spear, and showed works at the Paris Salon. He remained in Paris until 1905 when he returned to Washington, D.C. That same year, his first one-artist show was mounted by the Veerhoff Galleries in Washington. A second trip to Europe, this one lasting fifteen months, was begun in the spring of 1907. He spent a year in Germany and traveled to Spain, Morocco, and Italy.
In 1909, Warner became an active member of the art colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, and his preference for plein air landscape painting might be traced to that time. This eventually included an interest in cityscapes with views of New York and Pittsburgh, especially in winter, as the artist's favorites. At Old Lyme, he met and came under the influence of artists such as Willard Metcalf and especially Childe Hassam.
During the early years of the century, Warner wrote and illustrated travel articles for magazines including Century and Scribner's, an occupation he returned to in the 1950s. Warner taught at the Broadmoor Art Institute in Colorado Springs in 1922, the year before his marriage to Katherine Jordan Thomas. His major teaching affiliation, however, was with the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where he served as an associate professor of painting and design from 1924 to 1942. Warner served in both World Wars, developing a system of naval camouflage during World War I and enlisting in the United States Navy as a chief civilian aide on ship camouflage during World War II.
Towards the end of his career, Warner became interested in still life painting. He spent the later years of his life in Westmoreland, New Hampshire. In 1947 he painted part of the town
hall as a civic gesture. He executed a mural cycle for the Washington, D.C., Cosmos Club in 1952.
