Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown

Margaret Lesley Bush-Brown (Philadelphia, 1857 - Ambler, Pennsylvania, 1944) was an American painter and etcher trained in Philadelphia and Paris. Her work in portraiture and printmaking places her among the women artists who built professional careers in late nineteenth-century America.

The daughter of geologist Peter Lesley and social reformer Susan Inches Lyman, she first worked building geological models for her father. She studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and, in 1880, moved to Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie Julian and took lessons with Tony Robert-Fleury, Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Back in the United States, she learned etching under Gabrielle de Veaux Clements. In 1883 she exhibited at the Paris Salon, and in 1893 she painted the mural Spring for the Pennsylvania State Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

After marrying the sculptor Henry Kirke Bush-Brown in 1886, she settled in Washington, D.C., where she worked as a portraitist and miniaturist. Her portrait of Ellen Day Hale is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. A retrospective exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art followed in 1911. She moved to Pennsylvania in 1941 and died three years later at her son James's home.

Her legacy rests mainly on her portraits and on her papers, which are held at Smith College together with those of other family members.