Florine Stettheimer was born into a German international banking family in Rochester, New York, and lived a privileged existence during her youth.

She spent much of her early life traveling, studying art in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, and Switzerland. She studied for three years in the mid-1890s at the Art Students League in New York, but came into her own artistically upon her permanent return to New York after the start of World War I.

A legend of New York Bohemian lifestyle in the early 20th century, Florine Stettheimer was an artist who renounced academic training and focused on naive depictions of New York society as well as family portraits, flower and simply styled, lyrical conversation pieces.

Other than idiosyncratic and nonconforming, umbrella terms are not easy to assign to her work.

Barbara J. Bloemink, in her book The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer, describes her subject's paintings as "too satiric to be called romantic, too specific to fall under the heading of surreal or fantastic, and too obviously generated from a thorough knowledge of Western art history to be termed primitive."

Florine died aged 73 in New York.