(b London, 1834; d c. 1913). English painter. The eldest child in a curate’s family, she studied first at Mr Dickinson’s Academy in Maddox Street, London, and also received private tutelage from the portrait painter James Leigh (1808–60). She began exhibiting her works at the Royal Academy in 1851, while still an adolescent, and although her first paid work was in portraiture, she later became best known for genre subjects with a sentimental or didactic appeal. Between 1852 and 1856 she submitted a few entries to the British Institution in Pall Mall and from the late 1850s until the late 1870s sporadically sent works to the Royal Society of British Artists. Her greatest triumph occurred in 1855, when she received a 200-guinea commission for a portrait, and her Royal Academy picture entitled My Cottage Door (Brit. Royal Col.) was purchased by Queen Victoria. One of her early successes was Nameless and Friendless (Boughton, Northants, Sir David Scott priv. col.), which was praised by numerous critics in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1857 and was also singled out for distinction in Dafforne’s article on the artist (1864).