Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Julie Hart Beers was one of America’s first professional female landscape painters. The sister of well-known artists James and William Hart, she began painting landscapes in the 1860s and later established a studio in New York City’s Dodsworth Building. Throughout the 1870s, she spent summers traveling in New York, New Jersey, and New England, sketching directly from nature in graphite, chalk, and oil. She used her on-the-spot nature studies, such as Summer Woodlands (2021.157), as inspiration for finished studio oils and developed a reputation for painting intimate forest interiors. Quiet and contemplative, these vertical landscapes often feature small bodies of water, bold lighting effects, and painstakingly detailed depictions of foliage. Ducks in the Woods is unique in that the artist enlivened the composition with wildlife, adding three ducks at center that ascend through a clearing in the trees.