Henrietta Shore was born in Toronto, Canada, and took her art training at The Art Students League in New York City with Kenneth Hayes Miller and with Robert Henri and William Merritt Chase.  She stayed in New York for many years and then attended London's Heatherly Art School where she became a good friend of John Singer Sargent.

In 1913, she went to Los Angeles and helped establish the Los Angeles Society of Modern Artists.  She won a silver medal at the 1915 Pan-American Exposition in San Diego, and three years later, she and Helena Dunlap had a two-woman exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum.

She returned to New York City and in 1921 took United States citizenship.  Her artistic reputation increased and in the late 1920s, she had a retrospective of her work at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts and got favorable reviews.

In 1924, she was among twenty-five women chosen to represent American women in Paris and that year also traveled to Mexico where she did portraits of artists Jose Orozco and Jean Charlot.

Three years later, she returned to California where she became a close companion to photographer Edward Weston, who did a series of photographs based on her perceptions of nature.  In 1936, she worked for the Treasury Relief Art Project doing murals near Carmel and Monterey, one of them installed at the Monterey post office and another at the post office in Santa Cruz.

In her later years, she became reclusive in her home in Carmel, and the Carmel Art Association honored her posthumously with a retrospective of her paintings.

Source:
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists, p. 262

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