Born in Toronto, Canada on Jan. 22, 1880, Henrietta Shore began painting at age 13 and studied at St Mary's College in Toronto and later in New York City at the Art Students League with William Merritt Chase, Frank Vincent Dumond, and Robert Henri.While in London she continued at the Heatherly Art School and was the only private pupil of John Singer Sargent who greatly influenced her work. After arriving in Los Angeles in 1913, she became active in the local art scene and was a founder of the Modern Art Society. She maintained a studio in Los Angeles until 1920 and then led a peripatic existence: Newfoundland (1920), Maine (1921, NYC (1920-23), Mexico 1927-28), and San Francisco (1928-29).In 1924, she was among twenty-five women chosen to represent American women in Paris and that year also traveled to Mexico where she did portraits of artists Jose Orozco and Jean Charlot.Three years later, she returned to California where she became a close companion to photographer Edward Weston, who did a series of photographs based on her perceptions of nature. Shore was internationally known when an invitation to exhibit brought her to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930. After establishing a studio in Carmel, she remained and continued painting. In 1936, she worked for the Treasury Relief Art Project doing murals near Carmel and Monterey, one of them installed at the Monterey post office and another at the post office in Santa Cruz.Her early works were realistic but matured into impressionist and semi-abstract forms. Her visual repertoire includes landscapes, figure studies, portraiture, and floral still lifes. Robert Henri hailed her as one of the great women painters of her time. In her later years, she became reclusive in her home in Carmel, and the Carmel Art Association honored her posthumously with a retrospective of her paintings. Henrietta Shore and her Work by Merle Armitage was published in 1963, and a chapter was devoted to her in the 1939 book entitled Art from the Mayans to Walt Disney by Jean Charlot. Source:Edan Hughes, Artists in California, 1786-1940Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists, p. 262