The artist was a true animal lover, but while she abhorred cruelty to any animal, she accepted that some animals have been hunted by humans over the centuries for both subsistence and sport. The resulting “Trophy Heads” were mounted and presented as an art form in themselves.

The artist saw these “Trophies” as helping to celebrate the life, and preserve the memory, of an animal whose body would have otherwise disintegrated in the wild anonymously. She had a large collection of natural and exotic trophy heads, and worked from them and those she saw on her travels, trying to bring to life the unique spirit of each animal. On one trip, she drew the many trophy heads that filled the Ziegfeld Follies cottage, part of the great camp named “Wenonah,” built by financier Jules Bache in 1897 on Upper Saranac Lake, New York. She chose to draw those trophy heads on sheets of music paper to bring them to life!