Maria Beckett was born in 1840 in Portland, Maine, daughter of the Charles Beckett, a Maine Landscape and genre painter. Her painting, "Study of the Outdoors", (Etude en Plein Air, ca. 1875) is an exquisite oil on canvas that displays her experience gained by studying with the Barbizon masters, particularly Daubigny, while he and his pupil, Monet, were experimenting with early impressionism. After her work in France, she changed her name to A' Becket and became an accomplished tonalist painting during the latter decades of the 19th century.