The portrait is of Jane Peterson (1876–1965) who was a graduate of Pratt Institute and an American Impressionist and Expressionist painter. Her works are created in Impressionist and Expressionist styles using broad swaths of vibrant colors to combine an interest in light and in depiction of spontaneous moments and are well known for vivid, rich painted still life, beach scenes along the Massachusetts coast.[ Her works are housed in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Philadelphia Museum of Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Browne’s career spanned all aspects of the art world. She had a studio in the Fens and one in Annisquam, an attractive part of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she also taught classes. She began her career as a portrait painter in 1910, was the art editor of the Boston Evening Transcript from 1919–20, and authored a book, Portrait Painting, in 1933. In the book, she advised portraitists to work quickly to capture their sitter’s features and not exhaust them. She was a firm adherent of realism in art, and was quoted referring to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's 1940 Picasso exhibit as "an exhibition of crazy stuff." She also founded the Boston branch of the Society for Sanity in Art and served on the Advisory Board of Josephine Logan's Chicago branch, an organization promoting the retention of traditional values and styles in art.
