Born to a pioneering Indiana family, Susan Ketcham became a landscape and marine painter and teacher, working primarily on the East Coast. She was one of eighteen women who in 1883 founded the Art Association of Indianapolis, an entity that through her early efforts helped lead to the Indiana Museum of Art and the Herron School of Art. She organized the artwork for the Art Association's first exhibition and hired faculty to open its school. For the first year, she taught at the school and then ran summer trips around the U.S. and Europe. With her widowed mother and invalid brother, she left Indiana and spent two and a half years abroad, going to Scotland, Switzerland and the Bay of Naples. For Ketcham, Switzerland was a place of major inspiration, and she determined to live a life independent of her family.

As a middle-aged woman, she enrolled in the Art Students League in New York in 1888, and that same year was elected a life member. She studied with William Merritt Chase, and became good friends with him and much influenced by his teaching. In fact, she was godmother to his son. For Ketcham, New York City was the focus of her life for the next several decades, and she was especially involved with the Art Students League. She lived among many artists in her own apartment adjacent to Carnegie Hall and overlooking Central Park. For nearly 30 years, she held a "weekly" salon in her home.

In the summers, she usually went to Ogunquit, Maine and worked with Charles Woodbury, regarding him as the "finest of marine painters. Fascinated by "the force and power and great mass of the ocean", she did many seascape paintings in this setting. In 1906, she began managing Woodbury's summer classes, and by two years later had a nine-room studio home on the coastline.

In 1927, Susan Ketcham returned to Indianapolis, having sold her New York and Maine properties. Three years later she died at the age of 86.

Source:
Judith Vale Newton and Carol Ann Weiss, Skirting the Issue, pp/. 175-179