[1] In 1883, when she was sixteen, she enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she studied under well-known painter and photographer Thomas Eakins.

A sign of her stature as a photographer at that time may be seen by looking at the other members of the jury, who were Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Kasebier, Frank Eugene and Clarence H. White.

Frances Johnston, to whom she had written three years earlier, asked Watson to submit work for a groundbreaking exhibition of American women photographers in Paris.

"[6] Johnston persisted, however, and Watson had twelve prints – the largest number of any photographer – in the show that took place in 1901, the year she married Professor Martin Schütze, a German-born trained lawyer who had received his Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1899.

She and her husband later bought land nearby and built a home they called "Hohenwiesen" (High Meadows) where she would spend most of her summer and autumn months from about 1910 until about 1925.

Under Watson-Schütze's direction from 1929 to 1935, the society presented groundbreaking exhibitions of early modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and Constantin Brâncuși.

It was said of her tenure there, "In those six years she transformed the group from a largely amateurish, unfocused organization into an internationally recognized, truly vanguard institution advancing a rigorous modernist agenda.