Born in Chicago, Carr studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning to Chicago by 1880. In 1881, he moved to New York, regularly exhibiting thereafter at the National Academy of Design. He traveled to Mexico in the 1880s in search of subjects, and did a number of paintings of the Spanish-America War in Cuba in 1896, but he was best known for a series of paintings of rural Georgia life done in the early 1890s. These paintings were described in an article by Marguerite Tracy in {The Quarterly Illustrator} in 1894 as being the logical-and almost sole-successor to that time of Eastman Johnson's and Winslow Homer's Southern genre paintings. They were all painted in the vicinity of Tallapoosa, Georgia, where Carr had moved in 1891 in order to portray, in the words of the article, "the picturesque side of Georgia life," from the "open routine of the plantations" to the "irregular work of the moonshiners." Like Tallapoosa, Black Mountain was an excursion stop on the railroad that skirted the Blue Ridge Mountains. Carr no doubt stopped here en route to Tallapoosa.

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