After graduating from high school, she studied art briefly in New York but obtained most of her training in Paris from Claudio Castelucho and Lucien Simon.

In 1890, at the age of twenty-one, Upjohn completed a painting of angels for St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

Her uncle Richard M. Upjohn had designed the building and her father was currently its rector (having succeeded John Henry Hobart Brown his brother-in-law).

She was living in Brooklyn in 1912 when she executed a commission from Cornell alumni for a portrait of her uncle, Charles Babcock, a professor of architecture (emeritus) at the university.

Reviewing this show, a critic for the New York Times singled out a painting of Scandinavian children for its good characterization and "freshness and force of color".

[16] In 1914, the prestigious International Studio art magazine reproduced two paintings from a then-current exhibition and its critic called her "one of the best contributors lately at the MacDowell Club".

[12] Subjects of commissioned formal portraits in this period include Helen Van Vechten, maker of fine-press books; A. Cameron MacKenzie, president of Elmira College; General George Wood Wingate an early leader of the National Rifle Association and founder of a NY boys' club; Mary Williams, an Ithaca matriarch; and notables connected with Cornell University, including Andrew Dickson White, a historian and one of the founders of the university, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, an ornithologist, illustrator and artist, and the anatomist Charles Rupert Stockard.

Happening to be in Paris when war was declared, she volunteered her services to the local American Episcopal church in its efforts to help the refugees who poured into the city.

When, in 1917, the Paris-based Children's Bureau of the American Red Cross (ARC) asked her to make paintings for a series of health posters, she was reluctant to take time away from her relief work but she made five canvases for them all the same.

[31] Upjohn's role was to make works of art depicting European children in a favorable light: cheerful and friendly despite their difficult circumstances.

In September 1919, a striking drawing by Upjohn appeared in the first issue of the ARC's Junior Red Cross News with the caption, "This picture of boys and girls of France, with their beloved Tricolor, served as a poster in the Child Welfare Exhibits held in various cities of France a few months ago by the Children’s Bureau of the American Red Cross.

[33] The show generated considerable publicity in Washington with one critic saying Upjohn had "presented not only the pathetic, but the humorous, and has in many instances given her sketches the homely touch which makes for universal appeal.

[37] On her return to the United States, the Maryland Institute in Baltimore exhibited a large number of her drawings from East- and Southeast Asia as well as Western, Eastern, and Southern Europe, the collection showing, as one critic said, "not pictures of children suffering, but happy childhood under varying conditions of life".

[38] In 1935, the Cronyn & Lowndes Gallery in Manhattan gave Upjohn an exhibition of her paintings, including both formal portraits and informal child studies.

[42] In Mansfield, Ohio, the local newspaper headlined Upjohn as a "Famous Artist" whose work appeared in ARC posters, JRC literature, and other media.

Two years later, she illustrated a book by Clinton Scollard called Count Falcon of the Eyrie, a historical romance about a brave hero and high-spirited heroine set in Renaissance Italy.

[55] Entitled Some Adventures of Jack and Jill and comprised stories of children on a West Indian island, it received an admiring and quite long review in the New York Tribune.

Later that year, her illustrations appeared in a book by Clara Louise Burnham called The Quest Flower about a young girl who applies simple tenets of Christian Science to reconcile two estranged members of her family and heal a crippled playmate.

At this time her silhouette drawing of French children was reproduced in the first issue of Junior Red Cross News (shown above, Image No.

During the decade she served as a staff artist for the Junior Red Cross, Upjohn produced illustrations, many in color, for its magazine and its other publications.

[71] The issue of Junior Red Cross News for March 1922 contained a poem of hers, with illustration, about a boy seated high in a tree pretending he is on a sailing ship that is being blown from Winter into Spring.

Posted from London while she was waiting for permission to enter France, the letter described Upjohn's work as a volunteer in an Army canteen serving soldiers who, she wrote, were "full of fun and always cheerful", whether they were new recruits or recently returned from the front.

[77] In 1927, Houghton Mifflin published an illustrated collection of her stories entitled Friends in Strange Garments about the children she had met and sketched during her extensive travels on behalf of the Red Cross.

Caught in Paris when war was declared, Upjohn chose to volunteer as a relief worker at an Episcopalian church rather than sailing back home.

[79] In August 1914, she responded to a call for help from Dr. Samuel Watson, Rector of the American Church in Paris, who had begun to care for the first of the war's refugees.

[80] After her return to the United States in 1915, she exhibited drawings of refugees at the Ralston Gallery in New York and donated proceeds from her sales to the Secours National Fund for the Relief of Civilian War Sufferers in France.

[81][27] In January 1918 she explained her role as visiting the homes of widows to determine "the health and general condition of the children, whether the mothers have work and of what nature, and to give some account of their surroundings.

[84] In Rosieres, the Fund for Devastated Villages worked closely with the American Red Cross which had, by that time, established a well-funded organization for civilian relief services based in Paris.

[67][85] In September 1918, Upjohn joined the Red Cross Civilian Relief Agency and was made director of its operations in the Aube department of France.

As a Red Cross report later put it, "she acquiesced, although insisting that she regarded sketching and painting as a pleasure and felt that the war called for a more direct and personal service.