[3] Her first professor was Thomas Eakins, with whom she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before moving to Paris, in 1880, for further instruction;[4] in the intervening years she also took lessons at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women.

[3] In Paris, she enrolled in the Académie Julian and took lessons with Tony Robert-Fleury, Gustave Boulanger, and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, before returning to the United States in October 1883.

[3] She soon began moving in a circle with numerous other women artists, including Elizabeth Boott, Cecilia Beaux, and Mary Franklin, often summering with them along the East Coast.

[4] The Bush-Browns had three surviving children, two sons, Harold and James,[5] who became architects and a daughter, Lydia, who achieved some renown as an artist herself.

Bush-Brown exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and painted an mural Spring for the Pennsylvania State Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.