Abbott Fuller Graves (Born in 1859) was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts. His father was a furniture maker. It was his father who first taught him to paint. Graves joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he got his first formal training at the School of Design. As a teenager working in greenhouse, he decided to devote himself to flower painting. He went to Paris in 1884 for a year’s study with Georges Jeannin, the renowned flower painter in Europe. In 1886 Graves went to Boston where he worked at the Cowles School of Art as an instructor in flower painting. He got a warm reception by the Boston art colony, and he became a member of the Society of Boston Watercolor Painters, the Paint and Clay Club, the Boston Art Students Association, the Copley Society and the Boston Art Club. He was so successful as an artist that he got married in 1886. Fellow artists Childe Hassam and Edmund Tarbell were ushers at his wedding.
Both of them were instructors with Graves at the Cowles Art School and they were Impressionists. In 1887 during the spring Graves and his wife went to Europe, where they would spend 3 years while Graves attended the Académie Julian. As a result of his study of figure painting, Graves began to paint figures with flowers. In 1890 Graves and his family moved back to Boston – they already had one child - where he established his own school of painting. In 1893 he exhibited at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. And between 1902 and 1905 Graves was actively involved in the American Art Association of Paris where he was serving as Assistant Treasurer.
