ANNA PLESSET: What I love about this Julie Hart Beers painting is that it’s so intimate, and she is painting with such a fine brush which is actually the kind of brush (Laughs) that I use. 

My name is Anna Plesset, and I'm an artist.

There’s so much fine detail. You see these very intricate vines wrapping around one of the trees, and you’re sort of from the vantage point of the fourth or fifth or sixth duck flying through the woods. I think she does this to bring the viewer into this very quiet almost mysterious scene. 

NARRATOR: Beers was one of America’s first professional woman landscape painters, She traveled throughout the East Coast to intimately with nature. Her dedication to this creative practice is particularly remarkable in the context of her time and circumstances - sometimes even at the most practical levels. 

ANNA PLESSET: She was widowed, and she really sought painting as a vocation. She sold her work. She actively exhibited. She maintained a studio, and maintaining a studio alone was a tremendous feat.

In addition to finding the time away from her domestic duties, she would have been expected to also wear upwards of 14 pounds of clothes.

And so that's the other thing I'm thinking about when I look at her work, how she would have been painting outdoors after having hiked some five to ten miles to get to a specific location. She would have been wearing a corset, a jacket and potentially gloves and three skirts, and to imagine having to, in their words, “tramp,” (Laughs) through the woods, over rocks to get to some of these spots. It's really quite an achievement.