The artist began his working life in his brother's shoe factory in Northamptonshire. Starting at the age of thirty-one, he took art lessons in Glasgow whilst there on business, and later studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and Academie Julian. 

 A prolific and widely-travelled painter, who lived strictly to a personal code of 'work first', he painted in the vivid atmospheric manner of the Barbizon artists, often on a large scale (thus satisfying the Edwardian taste for large drawing room pictures); he was very impressed with the French landscape artists.

He was awarded numerous international medals and awards, and worked across Europe and in Japan and Africa, exhibiting at the RA from 1883 in every year until his death in 1913. Based in London, he visited St Ives from the 1890s to 1910, where his patience and scholarly approach to art had a strong bearing on the development of young painters.

He lived in The Terrace, St Ives. Charles MARRIOTT declared himself amused by the 'rivalry between East and Hemy as raconteurs.' His own writings include The Art of Landscape Painting in Oil Colour (1906) and  Brush and Pencil Notes in Landscape (1914, posthumous publication).  He was awarded the Grand Order of the Corona of Italy in 1903, and knighted in England in 1910.