John Frederick Peto was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1854. He was raised there and is listed in the 1876 Philadelphia directory as a painter residing on Chestnut Street (a favorite neighborhood of that city's artists). He was a musician as well as a painter and played the cornet in the Fire Department Band and at religious meetings. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, along with fellow student William Harnett, whose paintings were often confused with those of Peto due to their similarities in composition and subject matter.

Peto primarily painted still-life pictures as well as vertically oriented rack and door pictures and his paintings are notable for the realism of their worn and shabby objects. Because the articles depicted show wear and the effects of time, his paintings did not appeal to popular nineteenth-century taste, which valued more opulent imagery.

In June 1887 Peto married Christine Pearl Smith, and to earn money he began to commute to Island Heights, New Jersey, where he played the cornet at camp revival meetings. By 1889 he had settled there permanently, devoting his life to his family and to painting in his solitary studio, surrounded by the battered books, lamps, mugs, and pipes that appear in his art. Isolated in this riverside town, his career began to decline.

Beset by poverty, family problems, and ill health, John Frederick Peto died in Island Heights, NJ on November 23, 1907.