[2][4] Carl painted portraits, including those made in 1892 of Mahomet Ali and Prince El Hadj in Algiers.

[4][5] Carl exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

[7] She spent a total of nine months in China and painted four portraits of the Empress Dowager, later recording her memories as the only western foreigner to live within the precincts of the Chinese imperial court in its last days in a book that was published in 1905.

When I saw I must represent Her Majesty in such a conventional way as to make her unusually attractive personality banal, I was no longer filled with the ardent enthusiasm for my work with which I had begun it, and I had many a heartache and much inward rebellion before I settled on the inevitable.She stayed there under the provision that she did not share information about the Forbidden City.

[7] Carl's brother, Francis, worked for Sir Robert Hart at the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service.

Carl died December 7, 1938, at Lenox Hill Hospital of burns she received when taking a bath at her apartment.