Jane Peterson (1876-1965)

Illinois-born Jane Peterson, who coincidentally had studied under Arthur Wesley Dow at Pratt Institute in the late 1890s, was a respected and widely traveled painter long before she began summering in Ipswich in 1925. By 1910 she had exhibited her colorful street scenes in Paris, Boston, New York, and many other American cities. She was a close friend and peer of John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, and the wildly successful Spanish painter Joaquin Sorolla.

One of the factors she considered part of her success—the New York Times called her "one of the foremost woman painters in New York" in 1925—was her chosen status as a single woman. For nearly three decades she had been able to focus solely on her art. Finally, at the age of 49, Peterson married a wealthy widower named M. Bernard Philipp.

For the next five years, until his death in 1929, the couple spent winters in New York City and summers at his Rocky Hill estate in Ipswich. Unable to travel and paint in exotic places as was her habit, Peterson began to paint flowers instead. Every summer for the next quarter of a century the artist planted, cultivated, and then painted zinnias, peonies, and petunias at Rocky Hill. By the time she died in 1965, Jane Peterson had come to be known more for her Ipswich flower paintings than for her views of Paris, Constantinople, Turkey or any of the other exotic locales she had visited in her younger days.