A landscape painter, Eaton moved with his family to Cleveland, and then to Detroit where he lived between 1867 and 1878. Several years after arriving in Michigan, he invested his inheritance from his father in the shipping industry and lost it. At that point he took up painting as a self-taught amateur. In 1879, a year after his move to Holly, MI, he married Silva Baird. By 1881, he had relocated in Chicago, but the following year, he took up residence in New York. Despite this definitive move east, he is known to have returned to conduct sketching trips in the Detroit area in the late 1880s. Eaton built himself a home, "The Cricket," in 1892 in Leonia, New Jersey, where he seems to have retired permanently several years later. He had been active in the American Water Color Society, in which he served as secretary for fourteen years.
