Sidney Lawrence Brackett (1852-1910) was born in Boston and studied under John B. Johnson and Frederic Porter Vinton. He was a member of the Boston Art Club, where his work appeared in exhibitions throughout the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century.

Brackett is particularly known for his detailed and lifelike animal paintings, which remain among the most outstanding American examples of a genre largely lost today. He successfully combined realism with the 19th-century sensibility toward the small pleasures of domestic life, which in Victorian and Edwardian times included portrayals of children and family activities as well as family pets. For many persons, these paintings are of great ch...