A native of Philadelphia, the landscape painter Henry Boller Pancoast, Jr. studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1896 to 1900 and at the Drexel Institute. He was a member of the Philadelphia Art Club, and exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1903 until 1930. He made sketching trips to New England and executed several paintings of Gloucester Harbor, Massachusetts. Pancoast's painting of The Hague, Netherlands, done around 1905, indicates that he must have been in Europe at some point.