Grace Anne French was born in 1858 in New Hampshire. She received rigorous training at the Lowell School of Industrial Design, the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined her family in Rapid City around 1885.
Grace is credited with being the first resident landscape painter in South Dakota and is best known for her beautiful scenes painted en plein air of Black Hills streams, mountainsides and townscapes.
She was an early art instructor at Black Hills College in Hot Springs. From 1900 until her death in 1942, French maintained a studio in her Rapid City home, where she taught art fundamentals with her sister Abbie. Although French was adept at portraits and still life painting, she is most known for her able landscapes of the Black Hills region.
