Trained in New Orleans and Paris, Campbell had the double distinction of being the first Southern woman who came to New York to make portrait painting a profession, and one who has earned a competency.

Her father was one of the wealthiest and most influential men in the South,[2] where the family lived and had been social leaders all the way back to the times of Osceola and President Jackson.

A letter from Colonel Frederick Dent Grant speaks of Campbell's portrait of his father as “an excellent likeness, and one of the best he has seen in oil.” An unsuccessful attempt was made by burglars to steal this valuable painting shortly after it was finished; they had cut it almost entirely from the frame when they were suddenly surprised and fled.

Others included Joseph William Drexel and his daughter, Elizabeth Wharton Drexel; a daughter of Mr. William Kissam Vanderbilt; a nephew of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt; Miss Fanny Field; Mary Ball, the mother of Mrs. Washington, taken from a water color in possession of Mrs. Benjamin S. Storey, a great-niece of General Washington; and two children of Jacob Perkins, of Cleveland, Ohio, who are represented taking five o’clock tea on the lawn in front of the house;[3] General Ulysses S. Grant sat for Campbell.

A letter from Colonel Frederick Dent Grant speaks of Campbell's portrait of his father as “an excellent likeness, and one of the best he has seen in oil.” An unsuccessful attempt was made by burglars to steal this valuable painting shortly after it was finished; they had cut it almost entirely from the frame when they were suddenly surprised and fled.

In addition to this particular portrait for the family, she made six others: one for the late Senator Stanford, one for the Republican Club of Helena, Montana, and one for a prominent resident of Chicago.