Susan Waters painted this quietly haunting posthumous portrait of Catherine Quackenbush Slade (1821–1844), who died of fever following childbirth. Waters attended a girls’ seminary where she helped pay for her tuition by making botanical illustrations, a skill she deployed in painting the detailed rose depicted in the book held by Slade here. Waters later supported herself and her husband through her work as an itinerant portrait painter, traveling in southern New York State and along the Pennsylvania border. Waters was also notable as a feminist and activist: she became the Recording Secretary of the New Jersey Women’s Suffrage Association and lectured there in 1871, and she later supported efforts against animal cruelty.