Against the conventions of her time, Jane Peterson traveled the world alone, painting street scenes, urban and natural vistas, and bold, avant-garde compositions of flowers. Her works combine an academic attention to naturalistic detail with thoroughly modern, striking color combinations and loose, expressive brushstrokes. Peterson associated with and drew influence from the artistic luminaries of the 20th century, attending Gertrude Stein’s famous salons while living in Paris and traveling with Louis Comfort Tiffany, Maurice Prendergast, and Childe Hassam. Peterson may be best known for her paintings of flowers, as she authored an instructional book entitled Flower Painting in 1946. She is quoted as saying, “I paint flowers because they are my friends and I love them. They have personalities just as animals, birds and people (do), and are very sensitive to kindness, attention and to their surroundings.” (https://new.liveauctioneers.com/item/43613518_jane-peterson-american-1876-1965) After marrying in 1925, Peterson devoted most of her time to painting floral subjects. The artist painted in her beautiful gardens at her estate in Ipswich, New York. In 1946, she wrote a how-to book on painting flowers---“Flower Painting”. (artandinfluence.blogspot.com) One of the factors she considered part of her success was her chosen status as a single woman. For nearly three decades she had been able to focus solely on her art. Finally, at the age of 49, Peterson married a wealthy widower named M. Bernard Philipp. For the next five years, until his death in 1929, the couple spent winters in New York City and summers at his Rocky Hill estate in Ipswich. Unable to travel and paint in exotic places as was her habit, Peterson began to paint flowers instead. Every summer for the next quarter of a century the artist planted, cultivated, and then painted zinnias, peonies, and petunias at Rocky Hill. By the time she died in 1965, Jane Peterson had come to be known more for her Ipswich flower paintings than for her views of Paris, Constantinople, Turkey or any of the other exotic locales she had visited in her younger days. (From escapesnorth.com) at http://rompedas.blogspot.nl/2010/07/one-of-foremost-woman-painters-in-new.html