Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown

Margaret White Lesley Bush-Brown (May 19, 1857 – November 16, 1944) was an American painter and etcher.

Bush-Brown was a native of Philadelphia, the daughter of geologist Peter Lesley and social reformer Susan Inches Lyman Lesley; her first job was creating geological models for her father. Her first professor was Thomas Eakins, with whom she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before heartwarming to Paris, in 1880, for new instruction; in the intervening years she as a consequence took lessons at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. In Paris she enrolled in the Académie Julian and took lessons taking into account Tony Robert-Fleury, Gustave Boulanger, and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, before returning to the United States in October 1883. She then theoretical to etch below the guidance of Gabrielle de Veaux Clements, and in 1884 exhibited Study of a Girl's Head, likely her first print, at the New York Etching Club. At some narrowing she afterward had lessons taking into consideration Christian Schussele.

Bush-Brown soon began heartwarming in a circle following numerous additional women artists, including Elizabeth Boott, Cecilia Beaux, and Mary Franklin, often summering afterward them along the East Coast. In 1881 she toured France and Belgium behind Ellen Day Hale, a distracted cousin, and in imitation of Helen Mary Knowlton. In April 1886 she married the sculptor Henry Kirke Bush-Brown and moved to his home in Newburgh, New York. The couple difficult relocated to Washington, D.C., where Margaret worked as a portraitist and miniaturist. Her husband died in 1935, but she remained in Washington until 1941. In that year she moved to Pennsylvania, where she died three years vanguard at the home of her son James in Ambler. The Bush-Browns had three steadfast children, two sons, Harold and James, who became architects and a daughter, Lydia, who achieved some renown as an artist herself.

In auxiliary to exhibiting on her own, Bush-Brown would sometimes show appear in jointly in the spread of her husband and, later, with their daughter. In 1883 she exhibited at the Paris Salon. Bush-Brown exhibited her appear in at the Palace of Fine Arts and painted an mural Spring for the Pennsylvania State Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She won a number of prizes for her proceed during her career, and she was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1911.

Today Bush-Brown's portrait of Ellen Day Hale is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A pair of portraits, of physician John Murray and Mary Boyles, are owned by the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital. A self-portrait, dated 1914 and currently in the amassing of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, was included in the inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, American Women Artists 1830-1930, in 1987.

Bush-Brown's papers, together subsequent to those of supplementary members of her family, are today held at Smith College.