Due to her comfortable upbringing, she was immersed in the fine arts at a young age and picked up hobbies like playing piano and painting.

She married the American Civil War veteran Colonel George Ward Nichols in 1868, who had been hired by her family to catalog their vast collections of artwork.

The first festival was not held until 1873, the same year she began painting china under the instruction of German immigrant and ceramic chemist Karl Langenbeck.

By now well along in her skill as a ceramics painter, she returned home to Cincinnati with an appreciation for Japanese art and began incorporating some of those elements into her own work.

[5] In 1879, along with her fellow ceramics painter Mary Louise McLaughlin, Nichols commissioned the creation of an under-glaze and over-glaze kiln at a local pottery shop in Cincinnati.

Soon she employed a modest staff consisting of both men and women, including a potter and chemist named Joseph Bailey and, as her general assistant and a china decorator, Clara Chipman Newton.

In 1899 Bellamy Storer became the foreign minister of Spain, and the two convinced President William McKinley to petition Pope Leo XIII to make Archbishop Ireland a Cardinal (with the help of New York governor Theodore Roosevelt).

Ironically, Maria's nephew, Nicholas Longworth III, came to marry Roosevelt's daughter Alice later, and Storer refused to attend the wedding.