Florence moved to this house with her family when she was 16 years old. She earned a diploma in 1902 from Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston after completing the four-year program. This was the first publicly supported art school in America. It had been established in 1873 to train teachers of art. It was created as part of legislation that made teaching of drawing an obligatory part of public school education.

Florence’s studies included drawing from casts, life, watercolor studies of plants and flowers, details from historic schools of ornament, portraiture, sculpture and design. She continued her art education at Charles Woodbury’s School in Ogunquit, Maine, during the summers.

Florence taught art for more than 20 years at public and private schools in Sudbury, Wayland, and Framingham. At one time she had an art studio in Copley Square and later on Newbury Street in Boston.

She was a member of the Copley Society and the Cambridge Art Association. She exhibited her art at both places as well as at the Massachusetts Women’s Club and the Boston Art Club. Her portrait of her grandmother in the front parlor was painted when Florence was in her twenties. It was shown at the Boston Art Club, the Rochester, NY Fair in l908, and at the Copley Society in l930. Many of her paintings are here in the Hosmer House and others can be seen at Dartmouth College, NH, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Pierce-Nichols House in Salem, MA, the Ogunquit, ME Museum of Art, the Wayside Inn, and at Sudbury’s Goodnow Library. The Ogunquit Art Museum has had special exhibits of Florence’s paintings.