An expatriate Italian American, Cyrus Cuneo spent much of his career in England, from where he served as an artist-illustrator of the American West for the London Illustrated News. It was written that he became "an Englishman by preference and adoption."
In London, he was a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and from 1905 to 1912, he exhibited at the Royal Academy. He paid for his art training in Paris with James Whistler by boxing professionally. In 1908 on assignment with the Illustrated News, he made an extensive trip back to California and through Canada, where he was a special guest of personnel representing the Canadian Pacific Railroad. From this trip, he did a series of railroad oil paintings, which were destroyed during World War I in Liverpool.