She entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1905 [1] where she studied with Frank Weston Benson, Bela Lyon Pratt, Philip Hale, and Edmund Charles Tarbell, among others.
[3] In 1921 she founded the art department of Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, remaining on its faculty until 1949 and studying the application of child and adolescent behavior to education practice.
The painting depicts her older daughter who is in the center wearing a large hat, her nephew Winthrop Stearns who has his back to the viewer and her neighbor, Barbra Allen who has a yellow banana in her hand.
Van Ness retained the outdoor, sunlit figure with a bright palette that was found in American Impressionism, with her friend and teacher Frank Benson for example, while decreasing descriptive detail, representational volume and the emotional engagement of the viewer in order to experiment more with design and color.
[1] The Beaver Country Day School has founded the Beatrice Van Ness Society in the painter's memory,[7] and her papers are held by the Archives of American Art.