Adelaide Cole first studied painting with her father, Boston painter J. Foxcroft Cole, becoming acquainted with his many artistic friends (including Winslow Homer). She was educated locally with portraitist Frederic Porter Vinton and in Paris with Carolus-Duran. In 1892, Cole married architect William Chester Chase and continued her career, becoming best known for her portraits of women and children. In the 1920s, she made several copies after John Singleton Copley, Boston's famous eighteenth-century portraitist. At least two were intended to decorate the Women's City Club, a social and charitable organization led by Helen Osborne Storrow, founded in 1912 and located in the historic Appleton-Parker townhouses at 39/40 Beacon Street. Chase was a member, and her copy after Copley's portrait of Sarah Jackson Inches (then in a Boston private collection, now at the Huntington Library and Art Museum) was donated to the club by its art and library committee of 1924-25. It was an appropriate gift, for 40 Beacon had once belonged to the Inches family. Chase's copy is faithful to Copley's original; owning it allows the MFA to demonstrate the continuing appeal of Copley's work and its valued position in the 1920s, at the height of the colonial revival and a period of cultural nationalism in the United States.

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