Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown

Margaret White Lesley Bush-Brown (May 19, 1857 – November 16, 1944) was an American painter and etcher.

Bush-Brown was a native of Philadelphia, the daughter of geologist Peter Lesley and social reformer Susan Inches Lyman Lesley; her first job was creating geological models for her father. Her first professor was Thomas Eakins, with whom she studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts before moving to Paris, in 1880, for further instruction; in the intervening years she also took lessons at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. In Paris she enrolled in the Académie Julian and took lessons with Tony Robert-Fleury, Gustave Boulanger, and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, before returning to the United States in October 1883. She then learned to etch under the tutelage of Gabrielle de Veaux Clements, and in 1884 exhibited Study of a Girl's Head, likely her first print, at the New York Etching Club. At some point she also had lessons with Christian Schussele.

Bush-Brown soon began moving in a circle with numerous other women artists, including Elizabeth Boott, Cecilia Beaux, and Mary Franklin, often summering with them along the East Coast. In 1881 she toured France and Belgium with Ellen Day Hale, a distant cousin, and with Helen Mary Knowlton. In April 1886 she married the sculptor Henry Kirke Bush-Brown and moved to his home in Newburgh, New York. The couple later relocated to Washington, D.C., where Margaret worked as a portraitist and miniaturist. Her husband died in 1935, but she remained in Washington until 1941. In that year she moved to Pennsylvania, where she died three years later at the home of her son James in Ambler. The Bush-Browns had three surviving children, two sons, Harold and James, who became architects and a daughter, Lydia, who achieved some renown as an artist herself.

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