Alice Brown Chittenden (October 14, 1859 – October 13, 1944) was an American painter based in San Francisco, California who specialized in flowers, portraits, and landscapes. Her life's work was a collection of botanicals depicting California wildflowers, for which she is renowned and received gold and silver medals at expositions. She taught at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art (now the San Francisco Art Institute) from 1897 to 1941. Personal life Chittenden was born in Brockport, New York on October 14, 1859 to Joseph Gladding Chittenden and Ann Miriam Green Chittenden. Her parents had settled in San Francisco in 1858 from New York, but her mother returned to New York to await her birth. She had a sister, Carrie, who was two years younger than herself. Her father worked in wood mills in San Francisco. She attended Denman Grammar School and won a silver medal for being at the top of her class when she graduated in 1876. She studied with Virgil Williams at the School of Design (later known as the California School of Fine Arts and, today, San Francisco Art Institute) from 1880 to 1882. She received medals for both drawing and painting. She married Charles Parshall Overton in 1886 but left him and returned to her parents home in 1887, a few months before her daughter Miriam Overton was born in 1887. Overton became vice president and manager of the Union Fish Company in San Francisco. Alice was divorced by 1900 when she and her daughter, Miriam, lived with her mother on Octavia Street in San Francisco. Her sister, Carrie, and her family also lived with Ann M. Chittenden. Carrie's husband was William Taylor, a sea captain. Chitterden never remarried. New Woman As educational opportunities were made more available in the 19th century, women artists became part of professional enterprises, including founding their own art associations. Artwork made by women was considered to be inferior, and to help overcome that stereotype women became "increasingly vocal and confident" in promoting women's work, and thus became part of the emerging image of the educated, modern and freer "New Woman". Artists then, "played crucial roles in representing the New Woman, both by drawing images of the icon and exemplyfying this emerging type through their own lives." Chittenden exemplified the "New Woman" through her activism for social reform and the suffrage movement. Career She painted throughout her life. Although she did