Born in Windham, New Hampshire in 1857. Mary Titcomb was a professional artist in the Boston area and regularly traveled and painted in the West. She was also a long-time art teacher in the Massachusetts public schools. When she was 28, she moved to Boston where she lived at the YWCA and studied at Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Boston Museum School with Edmund Tarbell, Philip Leslie Hale, and Frank W Benson. She established herself as an independent woman, becoming Director of Drawing for Brockton public schools and showing regularly at the Copley Society. In 1898, she began traveling West, sketching in California, Arizona and Mexico. For some time, she lived and worked in Fenway Studios on Ipswich Street, but in 1920, bought a home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. She was a member of the New York Water Color Club, the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, and the Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts. One of her paintings, Portrait of Geraldine J., was purchased by Woodrow Wilson for the White House in Washington D.C.
