Mary Jane Rathbun was an American zoologist who specialized in crustaceans. She worked at the Smithsonian Institution from 1884 until her death. She described more than a thousand new species and subspecies and many higher taxa.
Mary Morris Vaux Walcott was an American artist and naturalist known for her watercolor paintings of wildflowers. She has been called the "Audubon of Botany."
Anne Beale was a popular English novelist and poet based in Wales. Her poetry, novels and stories appeared in print for over 50 years in her lifetime: "an unusually long career as an author". She was born and educated in Somerset and started a career as a governess. In 1841, she settled in Carmarthenshire. She started writing to supplement her teaching income, but she later earned enough to write full time.
Elizabeth Nourse was a realist-style genre, portrait, and landscape painter born in Mt. Healthy, Ohio, in the Cincinnati area. She also worked in decorative painting and sculpture. Described by her contemporaries as "the first woman painter of America" and "the dean of American woman painters in France and one of the most eminent contemporary artists of her sex," Nourse was the first American woman to be voted into the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She also had the honor of having one of her paintings purchased by the French government and included in the Luxembourg Museum's permanent collection. Nourse's style was described by Los Angeles critic Henry J. Seldis as a "forerunner of social realist painting." Some of Nourse's works are displayed at the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Fidelia Bridges was an American artist of the late 19th century. She was known for delicately detailed paintings that captured flowers, plants, and birds in their natural settings. Although she began as an oil painter, she later gained a reputation as an expert in watercolor painting. She was the only woman among a group of seven artists in the early years of the American Watercolor Society. Some of her work was published as illustrations in books and magazines and on greeting cards.
Elizabeth Adela Forbes was a Canadian painter who was primarily active in the UK. She often featured children in her paintings and School Is Out is one of her most popular works. She was friends with the artists James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert, both of whom influenced her work. Her etchings in particular are said to show the influence of Whistler.
Bertha Boynton Lum was an American artist known for helping popularize the Japanese and Chinese woodblock print outside of Asia.
Adela Akers was a Spanish-born textile and fiber artist residing in the United States. She was Professor Emeritus at the Tyler School of Art. Her career as an artist spans the "whole history of modern fiber art." Her work is in the Renwick Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Art and Design. Her papers are at the Archives of American Art.
Alice Brown Chittenden was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art from 1897 to 1941.
Maria Oakey Dewing was an American painter known for her depiction of flowers. Her work was inspired by John La Farge and her love of gardening. She also made figure drawings and was a founding member of the Art Students League of New York. Dewing won bronze medals for two of her works at world expositions. She was married to the artist Thomas Dewing.
Sara Allen Plummer Lemmon (1836–1923) was an American botanist. Mount Lemmon in Arizona is named for her, as she was the first Euro-American woman to ascend it. She was responsible for the designation of the golden poppy as the state flower of California, in 1903. A number of plants are also named in her honor, including the new genus Plummera, described by botanist Asa Gray in 1882.
Adelia Armstrong Lutz was an American artist active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She organized art circles in Knoxville, Tennessee, as director of the Knoxville Art Club and as a co-organizer of the Nicholson Art League. Her still lifes and portraits were exhibited throughout the American South, and they are to be the subject of a permanent exhibit at her former home, Historic Westwood.
Rebecca Merritt Austin was an American botanist and naturalist who collected and sold native plants in California and Oregon. Lomatium austiniae and Cephalanthera austiniae are named in her honor. She studied the chemistry, natural history of, and insects captured by the carnivorous pitcher plant Darlingtonia californica, and sold collected specimens to botanists and collectors. Her specimens are included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution and the California Academy of Sciences.
Frances Sanborn Baldwin (1907–1999) was an American painter and a descendant of a pioneer California family.
Emelie Tracy Young Swett was an American author, editor, poet and translator. She wrote both prose and verse, and in her literary work was often employed by publishers to translate French and German articles and books. She was at one time employed as the private secretary of a publishing house, and in this capacity she developed executive abilities. In 1889, she married John W. Parkhurst, an employee in the Bank of California. Swett contributed largely to the magazines and papers of the Pacific Coast. Her literary work included translations from Greek, French and German and some finished poems of high merit. She dramatized Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona. She founded the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association. She supported suffrage. For a year before her death, at the age of 29, she was assistant editor of the Californian Illustrated Magazine. Swett died in 1892.
Alice R. Tangerini is an American botanical illustrator. In 1972, Tangerini was hired as a staff illustrator for the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History by American botanist Lyman Bradford Smith. Prior to working at the Smithsonian Institution, she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University. As of March 9, 2017, Tangerini remains the only botanical illustrator ever hired by the Smithsonian.
Helen A. Manville was an American poet and litterateur of the long nineteenth century. Under the pen name of "Nellie A. Mann", she contributed largely for leading periodicals east and west, and obtained a national reputation as a writer of acceptable verse. At the height of her fame, she decided to stop using the pen name and assume her own. She succeeded in making both names familiar, virtually winning laurels for two cognomens, when ill-health required a pause in her literary work. A collection of her poems was published in 1875, under the title of Heart Echoes, which contained a small proportion of her many verses.
Adela Elizabeth Orpen was an Irish writer.
Emilie Ashurst (Hawkes) Venturi was an artist, writer, and activist who pushed for reforms in nineteenth-century Britain. She was the primary English translator of the works of Giuseppe Mazzini, the renowned Italian intellectual, and his devoted disciple. She corresponded with Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, the artist James McNeill Whistler, the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, the activist Josephine Butler, and the Irish politician John Dillon. She also painted portraits and published essays, translations, and some fiction. She and her first husband, Sidney Milnes Hawkes (1821-1905), separated in 1854. After her divorce was granted in 1861, she married the Italian patriot Carlo Venturi and became known as Madame Venturi. Their marriage ended with Carlo’s sudden death from a stroke. She also published as E.A.V and Edward Lovel. She belonged to a family, the Ashursts, who agitated for reforms across three generations and were the central figures in the Muswell Hill Brigade.
Adelia Antoinette Field Johnston was an American educator and college administrator. She was the first female faculty member at Oberlin College, where she taught history, and the school's Dean of Women from 1870 to 1900.
