[1] Phoebe Amelia Watson was born on 1 June 1858 in the village of Doon, now part of the city of Kitchener, Ontario (the area was then in Canada West).

[3] She left school while she was in her teens to help support her widowed mother and her siblings so her brother could devote himself to his art.

[4] It was said that "Miss Watson throughout her life has preferred rather than to put forward her own undoubted attainments, to base her chief claim to fame on her relationship with the painter of Doon, who from her childhood days loomed on her horizon a genius.

[6] The chosen artists included Watson, Lily Osman Adams (1865–1945) and Alice Egan.

[8] She became a curator of the Homer Watson Art Gallery in Doon, and held this post until her death on 22 October 1947.