Portrait study of Mrs. John Elliott (née Maud Howe)

[lower right in red ink]: stamped signature / stamped monogram initials; [bottom left in graphite]: Mrs. John Elliott (daughter of Julia Ward Howe)Howe Elliott was a novelist and suffragist. In 1893 she wrote the visitors guide to the Women’s Pavilion of the Chicago World’s Fair, a national cultural event that brought together the leading artists, architects, and muralists of the American Renaissance movement. Oakley was twenty-one years old when she visited the fair.Elliot and her sister Laura E. Richards won the Pulitzer Prize for The Life of Julia Ward Howe (1916), a biography of their mother, an advocate for women’s rights, an abolitionist, and the composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Howe Elliot married British artist John Elliott, who painted one of the first murals in the Boston Public Library. She and Oakley became acquainted in the 1930s.