During the American Civil War, he worked with the United States Sanitary Commission, distributing medicines and bandages to troops in the field. He painted genre scenes of camp life and domestic scenes that often included soldiers.[1]
He was in poor health, beginning in middle age, and settled in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.[3] There, he concentrated on painting flowers, especially roses, for the last 25 years of his life.[1][3] Many of these paintings were copied as chromolithographs and were mass-produced.
In 1868, he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an academician of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.[1] He died in Germantown on January 28, 1896.[1]