Anna Elizabeth Klumpke

As a girl in San Francisco she was given a "Rosa" doll, named after the most famous woman painter of the age, the French animal painter Rosa Bonheur. Decades later Anna Klumpke would live in that woman's house, paint her portrait, and inherit everything she owned.

Klumpke trained as a painter in Paris and built a real career of her own, with portraits of notable women including the American women's-rights campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1898 she went to stay with the ageing Bonheur and never left. The two signed a contract: Klumpke would paint Bonheur and write her life, and in return she was given a studio and a place at the older woman's side.

When Bonheur died in 1899 she left Klumpke her entire estate, over the fury of her own relatives. Klumpke spent decades afterward guarding that legacy, publishing Bonheur's biography and later her own memoirs. She died in San Francisco in 1942, the same city where she had been given that doll as a child.