Anne Vallayer-Coster had an artistic upbringing and received wide acclaim for her still-life painting. At 26, she was accepted to the prestigious Académie Royale.

Helen Levitt celebrated the people of the city, turning mundane or fleeting scenarios into drama.

Vivian Mayer’s legacy included 100,000 negatives from her highly original street documentary photographs.

Best known as a portraitist and longtime fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Louise Dahl-Wolfe helped redefine the look of fashion.

I drew this 17th century illustration from one of Maria Sibylla Merian’s New Flower books. A perceptive observer of nature since childhood, Merian discovered several new species of insects and plants as part of her work.

Jessie Willcox Smith illustrated hundreds of books, magazines, posters and advertisements seen by millions of people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Laura Gilpin settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico and spent her 60+ year career creating a photographic record of Navajo life, as well as being one of the few female landscape photographers of her time.

Clementine Hunter never learned to read or write, but created thousands of paintings. She also quilted, painted murals, still lifes, abstract works and developed her own experimental techniques.

Elizabeth Gould (1804-1841) was one of the earliest scientific bird illustrators. She traveled the world with her taxidermist husband contributing to seminal book collections of rare birds in Europe, the Himalayas and Australia.

Tina Modotti’s subjects included portraits, architecture, the Mexican muralist movement, the dignity of workers, as well as more abstract compositions.

Originally from Pennsylvania and attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, painter and printmaker Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) went on to study the old masters in Europe.

Elizabeth Clarkson (1771-1852) likely made this quilt as a wedding gift for her son, and it became a treasured family heirloom. She was a forerunner in using this patchwork technique with printed cotton fabric in such an elevated way.

Rosa Bonheur was a French painter and sculptor best known for her meticulous portraits of animals.

Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was a photojournalist, fashion photographer and avant garde artist. Her cutting edge work was included in landmark exhibitions in Paris and New York.

Anna Ancher trained in Copenhagen as well as Skagen, her hometown that’s also an internationally-known art colony. She painted many interiors with careful attention to light.

Berenice Abbott had a long and successful photography career in portraits, architecture and science. But I especially like her 1930s New York City street scenes, which were featured in the 1937 “Changing New York” exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York.

Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877-1968) was an American artist who trained in Philadelphia and exhibited in Europe. She influenced both the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement with her sculpture, painting, theatrical design and poetry.

Giovanna Garzoni (1600-1670) was an Italian artist known primarily for her botanical paintings. Many of her works combine fruit and flowers with a small creature - like a wasp or bird, in the foreground.

Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) was an American artist whose oil and watercolor works focused primarily on nature and botanical details.

A child prodigy and established painter at the age of 12, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) was known for her Neoclassical landscapes, history paintings, and most notably, portraits.