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Henry Peters Gray was born in New York City and studied with Daniel Huntington before further training in Rome and Florence. Elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1842, he later succeeded Huntington as its president for 1870–71. Italian Renaissance painting guided his taste for classical subjects, warm tonal colour, and carefully finished figure groups. In later years he devoted himself mainly to portraiture. He died in New York in 1877.
Notable canvases include The Greek Lovers (1846; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), The Wages of War (1848; Metropolitan Museum of Art), and The Pride of the Village (1858–59; Metropolitan Museum of Art), the last based on a Washington Irving story. Allegorical works such as The Birth of Our Flag (1875) show his continued interest in elevated, literary themes for an American public.
Gray belonged to the mid-nineteenth-century New York generation that looked to antique and Italian models for ideal figure painting. His pictures combine narrative clarity with mellow colour and a polished academic finish. They record how American painters adapted Old Master ideals to local subjects and institutions.