Artist Abbot Fuller Graves was born in Weymouth, Massachusetts and had originally studied to become an architect. However, a latent interest in floral still-life painting prompted him to travel to Paris, France 1884 for art study, where he roomed with another Boston artist, Edmund Charles Tarbell. In 1886, with his financial success as an artist assured, he married and his friends Childe Hassam and Edmund Tarbell served as his ushers. In 1887 Graves made a second trip to Paris, this time .