Born in Grand Island, Nebraska, her family moved to San Diego when she was a child. In 1901 she enrolled at Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco. She financed her education with Chinatown child genre and portraits. They became popular and widely circulated when she perfected a color process to make reproductions. Making money, she traveled and studied with William Merritt Chase in New York and in Paris for six years. During her career, she had studios in Los Angeles, San Francisco from 1918 to 1927, Greenwich Village in New York from 1927 to 1933 and for the remainder of her life, San Francisco.