About the artist:

Earl Stetson Crawford was born into a prominent Philadelphia family, the grandson of hat-maker, John B. Stetson. At the turn of the 19th century, after studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts*, he joined a stream of aspiring American artists heading to Paris and enrolled in the newly-opened Academie Carmen* of early modernist James McNeill Whistler. The eccentric Whistler thought enough of Crawford's abilities to appoint him "monitor" of his art class, and "when critiquing the work of other students, Whistler would borrow Crawford's palette because he said it made him 'feel at home' " (Merrill, 166)