Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Marion Allen was a prolific New England painter of portraits and landscapes, but did not begin landscape painting until later in her career. She was a pupil of Edmund Tarbell and Frank Weston Benson at the School of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts and exhibited at the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

In 1925, at the age of sixty-three, she left her Boston studio to make the first of many trips West including California Washington and Oregon, and it was in these places that she added landscape painting to her subject matter. She scaled mountains, lived in isolated cabins, and experienced numerous hardsh...