Largely self-taught as an artist, Gerry began his career making portraits and miniatures.  In the mid-1830s he left Boston for an extended three-year trip through England, France, Switzerland and Italy, where he met Boston artist George Loring Brown.  Upon his return he established a studio in Boston and made frequent trips to New Hampshire and the coasts of Massachusetts and Maine to sketch and paint.

In 1850, Gerry was living in Malden with his wife, Martha, four daughters, and one son whom he named Allston after Boston’s most beloved painter, Washington Allston.  He took a studio in the Studio Building shortly after it was finished in 1862 and stayed there for the next twenty-nine years.   he was a well known teacher and active in Boston’s art circles.  In 1854, he was a founding member and president of the Boston Art Club. He exhibited regularly in New York and Philadelphia.

While he produced a number of marine paintings, Gerry is best known for his poetic, somewhat idealized landscapes, particularly those set in the White Mountains. He exhibited in nearly every Boston Art Club exhibition from its inception until the year he died. At the end of his long and productive career he wrote several articles about Boston art and artists of the mid-nineteenth century.

References: See Samuel L. Gerry “Reminiscences of the Boston Art Club and Notes on Art,” (ms. in Boston Athenaeum) and “Old Masters of Boston,” New England Magazine n.s. 3, no. 6 (Feb. 1891); Athen.;  Boston City Directories 1855-1925.;  Janice H. Chadbourne, Karl Gabosh and Charles O. Vogel, The Boston Art Club: Exhibition Record 1873-1909 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1991).;  Catherine  H. Campbell, New Hampshire Scenery: A Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Artists of New Hampshire Mountain Landscapes (Canaan, NH: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1985).; Rolf H. Kristiansen and John J. Leahy, Rediscoverimg Some New England Artists 1875-1900 (Dedham, MA: Gardner-O’Brien, 1987).