Her family, men, and society: they all said she couldn’t do it, but Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome persisted. Male artists thought she and other women were too fragile to sketch directly from nature. She nevertheless traveled into the wilderness to study the trees, rocks, bushes, and grasses seen in the foreground of this carefully composed landscape. To discourage Jerome, her stepmother destroyed the artist’s early works. Years later, Jerome resumed painting, ultimately creating this scene of a lake set against mountains below a glowing sky.

Jerome worked at a time when women rarely pursued careers, let alone became professional artists. She sometimes exhibited her paintings under the name E. Gilbert Jerome or signed them G. Jerome, as she did here.