Described as the “dean of Delaware painters,” Ethel Leach was a founding member of the Rehoboth Art League, the center of the artist colony in Southern Delaware. Leach was a life-long resident of Frederica, Delaware, which she depicted often in her work. She studied illustration with Howard Pyle (1853–1911) and at the Académie Moderne in Paris, and kept a cottage at Rehoboth Beach with her husband, fellow painter William Leach. There they painted pictures for tourists and local patrons, depicting the pine forest, dunes, shipwrecks, and Henlopen Lighthouse before it fell into the sea in 1926.