Raised in the Quaker religion, she attended the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island.
During the Works Projects Administration (WPA), she was secretary of the Boston Artists' and Writers' Union.
[5] She illustrated numerous children's books for Houghton Mifflin, United Church Press, and other publishers, and worked as a commercial artist.
[2] In the late 1940s she was a mentor to Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo, then a student at Harvard.
The family frequently spent time on Cape Cod, moving permanently to Brewster, Massachusetts, in 1972.