Ruth Henshaw Bascom was born in Leicester, Massachusetts. Her life and career as a portraitist are exceptionally well documented, owing to the existence of the journal she kept from 1789 through 1846, in which she recorded more than one-thousand likenesses.

After the death of her first husband in 1805, the artist married the Reverend Ezekiel Bascom and settled in Gerry (now Phillipston), Massachusetts, where she was a teacher, church record keeper, librarian, hat maker, and artist. In 1821 the Bascoms moved to Ashby, Massachusetts, and by 1828 Ruth was producing about forty portraits a year, working in Ashby, Cambridge Port, Boston, and Athol, Massachusetts.

After Reverend Bascom's failing heal...