On an afternoon in early September 1907, a nearly 50-year-old woman made the steep climb up into the hills above Florence.

She was a painter, an impressionist we would call her now. As she came to a spot that suited her,

she turned to look at the familiar scene behind her that so many painters and other artists had

captured before her. the reddish golden

domes of the Duomo and the roofs and the turrets of that Renaissance city lit by the Italian

sun. But that wasn't the scene that interested her. Instead, she turned her back on the city

and fixed her gaze further up into the hills. She set up her easel and she began to work. It was the unexpected,

the surprising, the beautiful in the everyday, and as the title of the recently published biography

of her clearly shows, she was fascinated in forever seeing new beauties. Those unexpected elements

that appear all around us that give us beauty.

Her name was Mary Rogers Williams, an American woman born in the middle of the 19th century

in the farmlands of Connecticut who found herself fascinated by so many of the scenes that once

captured the great old masters. She left the world unexpectedly not long after that afternoon of sketching in the hills above Florence,

and thanks to my guest today, author and independent scholar Eve Khan, we now know her story.

Eve herself beautifully paint scenes from Mary's life in words like the one that I just described to you in her

book and in her talks and her lectures about Mary. It is through Eve's artistic detective work

unwinding a story that has countless twists and turns that we today can appreciate and see

inside an everyday life of a long-lost female American Impressionist painter.

So join me as we go back in time and discover her story.

Music Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, produced by Bowery Boys Media.

Every two weeks, I'll take you under the velvet ropes and behind the glitter in the gold to share stories, secret style, and often some scandal in the worlds of America's gilded age, France's Belipoc, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

A few years ago, when I was working in the art auction world, a colleague handed me a neatly folded bag that

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