At the same time the railways were heavily expanding across the United States, Beckett worked with her father to illustrate for her uncle's promotional railroad material.
It was the most destructive fire at the time in American history; it consumed around two-thousand buildings and left almost ten-thousand of the city's thirteen-thousand citizens homeless.
[3] She was among the first American artists to study with champions of the Barbizon school, known for concentrating on informal rural scenery that fit Romantic conceptions of nature.
The Barbizon painters in Europe, such as Théodore Rousseau, Jules Dupre, Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet, fully immersed themselves within the natural settings they used as inspiration.
“The insight of the Barbizon artists was that freer paint handling could capture a fresh appreciation of the spontaneous rhythms of natural scenery”[3] with which Hunt embraced and brought to America.
It is said "Beckett follows Daubigny in her liberated, sketch-like, 'painterly' brushstrokes, her unusual color range, and her choice of patently ordinary 'humble' natural scenery as subject matter.
The Ponce de Leon Hotel artists entertained potential patrons and sold their works at weekend gala receptions where Becket shone as a 'brilliant conversationalist, a delightful raconteur' whose social success at times kept her from opening her studio".