Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1835 Julie Hart Beers was one of very few women to become a professional landscape painter in her day. The sister of well-known artists James and William Hart, she began painting landscapes in the 1860s and later established a studio in New York City’s Dodworth Building. A young widow with two children she supported her family by leading painting trips for young women. Throughout the 1870s, she spent summers traveling in New York, New Jersey, and New England, sketching directly from nature in graphite, chalk, and oil. She developed a reputation for painting intimate forest interiors. In the 1870s and 1880s she exhibited frequently at the National Academy of Design, Brooklyn Art Association, the Boston Athenaeum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.