When Abbott Handerson Thayer and George de Forest Brush first met as aspiring artists at the National Academy of Design in 1870 and continued to enjoy each other’s company throughout the early 1870s while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, they might not have known that their friendship was destined to be long lasting and steadfast. By the 1890s, both men had families of their own and settled in the artist colony of Dublin, New Hampshire; in fact, Brush moved to Dublin to be near Thayer. Being year–round neighbors in a summer resort area, the Thayer and Brush children became friends as well and often exchanged letters while traveling. The two artists’ outlook on art and society could not have been more compatible, adopting a spiritual approach toward painting and a transcendentalist stance against the confines of formal education. Reflecting on the early years of their friendship in Paris, Brush once wrote in the preface to a catalogue of Thayer’s work: “It was his stand as against the drift of the quarter that… attracted me to him.” Despite different compositional devices and iconographic references, Thayer’s Woman in Grecian Gown and Brush’s Mother and Child both function as idealizations of womanhood.