Painter-printmaker Nan Jane Sheets was born in Albany, Illinois in 1885. She took a degree in pharmacy from Valparaiso University, Indiana, and worked in that field for a short period in Salt Lake City, Utah. There she took classes in art and realized that her great love was that activity. She married Fred Sheets and moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma and then to Oklahoma City in 1914.

By 1910, she was a serious painter, but it was during the 1920s that she matured as a fine artist. She spent summers of 1919 to 1923 studying art at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, and in 1923 went to Taos, New Mexico with Nellie Knopf and to Gloucester, Massachusetts with Hugh Breckenridge. she also painted in Maine, Woodstock, New York, a...