Jean Leon Gerome Ferris was an American painter who used academic realism to stage a distinctly national idea: history as a shared spectacle. Born in Philadelphia, he grew up amid prints, portraits, and studio talk. His father, the portraitist and etcher Stephen James Ferris, admired Jean-Léon Gérôme and named his son in homage. Ferris studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, then traveled to Europe in the 1880s, enrolling at Paris’s Académie Julian under William-Adolphe Bouguereau and later studying privately with Gérôme. Back in the United States, Ferris worked as an illustrator and painter, increasingly concentrating on historical subjects intended for wide audiences rather than private collectors. His major enterprise became The Pageant of a Nation, a cycle of 78 scenes from American history, often cited as the largest such series completed by a single artist. After selling an early canvas, he decided the project’s meaning depended on unity: he kept the paintings together and instead sold reproduction rights. Prints, postcards, calendars, and advertising cards carried his imagery into classrooms, parlors, and storefronts. The full series was displayed at Congress Hall in Philadelphia from 1913 to 1930. It later toured other venues, including the Smithsonian Institution. Ferris married Annette Amelia Ryder in 1894 and remained rooted in Philadelphia until his death. Later critics questioned the series’ idealization, yet his meticulous attention to costume, architecture, and objects—and his understanding of mass distribution—made him a major contributor to the visual culture of American historical memory.