The oldest of ten children, Rosina Emmet Sherwood was one of a family of female artists that included several of her sisters and cousins. She spent the early years of her career studying with William Merritt Chase in New York and working as a china plaque and tile painter. She also illustrated and wrote for Harper Brothers and created pattern designs for Associated Artists. She began regularly exhibiting work at the National Academy of Design in 1881 and later showed at the exhibitions of the Boston Art Club and Society of American Artists. Rosina married in 1887, and gradually painted less as each of her five children were born although she still displayed work at exhibitions and painted a mural in the rotunda library of the Women's Building at the Worlds Columbian Exposition in 1893. Rosina traveled to Savannah in 1918 to tend to her son Robert who had been wounded in World War I. It was on this trip she completed these watercolors, most likely traveling to Charleston on a day trip. Sherwood died at age 94 in 1948.

Biography courtesy of The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, www.antiquesandfineart.com/charleston