Theresa F. Bernstein was born in Philadelphia in 1895 to cultured, middle-class immigrant parents. She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, from which she graduated in 1911 with an award for general achievement. From Daniel Garber, her most memorable teacher, she carried forward a plein-air landscape painting with startling color contrasts and bright accents of light. After a brief enrollment at the Art Students League in New York, where she took life and portraiture classes with William Merritt Chase, she traveled for a second time to Europe with her mother, her first trip abroad having been made in 1905. Never a formal student of Robert Henri, she nonetheless embraced his philosophy of depicting the city...