Jane Peterson was born in Elgin, Illinois in 1876. She moved to New York in 1895, and began her Academic training at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After graduating in 1901, Peterson continued her education at the Art Students' League and then began teaching art in public schools in Elmira, New York; Boston, Massachusetts, and at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. In 1907, after a few years of teaching, Peterson went to Europe with one of her former instructors from the Pratt Institute, Henry Snell and his wife. Snell organized the trip, and together the trio visited the Cornish coast of England, Holland, northern Italy, and Venice. Peterson was so enthralled with Europe and its wealth of art that she remained there after the Snells' study-tour was over. After admiring the work of English artist Frank Brangwyn at the Venice Biennale, Peterson traveled to London to study with him at the London School of Art.

On Brangwyn's advice, Peterson went to Paris in the spring of 1908 to study with one of the most celebrated society portraitists of the time, Jacques-Émile Blanche. This year was also a watershed in Peterson's career, for she received her first solo exhibition at the Société des Artistes Français in Paris and, later that year, at the St. Botolph Club, Boston. Excited with these developments, Peterson returned to Venice and spent the remaining months of 1908 working in the city that was quickly becoming her favorite haunt. There Peterson met American artist Francis Hopkinson Smith, who encouraged her to meet and study with the great Spanish Impressionist, Joaquìn Sorolla y Bastida, after noticing similarities in their styles. Smith arranged for a meeting, and, in the summer of 1909, Peterson arrived in Madrid for six months of exclusive study with the Spanish master.

Sorolla brought out the best in Peterson, and, of all her teachers and mentors had the most profound influence on her style. Under his guidance, Peterson's work took on a new brilliance of color and spontaneity of execution. He encouraged her to be prolific, arguing that painting ten or more oil sketches a day would produce better results than completing one ambitious canvas. In 1910, Peterson left Madrid with new artistic direction. This new direction is very much evident in our work, Central Park, where she combined energetic brushwork with a luminous, complementary palette in a style that fused her firsthand knowledge of French Impressionism, Fauvism, Post-Impressionism with thorough academic study. Her confident, bold shapes reveal a very modernly individualistic, almost abstract sensibility towards this view within New York's Central Park. Clearly, she was in full command of her powers by this time in her career.

Peterson returned to America that year, and in December she triumphantly opened a solo exhibition of eighty-seven paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago. The next years were rich and full of travel. Peterson was in Paris in 1912; in 1915, she visited the American Southwest; in 1916, she accompanied Louis Comfort Tiffany on a transcontinental painting expedition to the Canadian Northwest and Alaska. Also in 1916, Peterson visited the art colonies of New England - Gloucester, Newport, Provincetown, and Ogunquit. But Europe remained her passion, and Peterson returned there nearly every summer for the next decade, except for the years of the First World War.

Jane Peterson enjoyed tremendous success throughout her career being given over 80 solo exhibitions including the Art Institute of Chicago, 1910 and 1916; Flower Painting exhibition at Newhouse Galleries in New York City, 1946; and the Art Club of St. Petersburg, Florida, 1952. Peterson exhibited her works at prestigious venues including the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915; the American Watercolor Society of New York, and the North Shore Arts Association, Massachusetts. In 1925, The New York Times characterized Peterson as "one of the foremost women painters in New York."

Peterson's works can be found in the following prestigious collections: Everson Museum Of Art, Syracuse, NY; Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Ipswich Historical Society, Ipswich, MA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of the City of New York, New York, NY; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Richmond Art Museum, Richmond, IN; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY; The Emerson Gallery, Clinton, NY; The Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC; The Mariners' Museum, Newport News, VA; The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD and the Vero Beach Museum Of Art, Vero Beach, FL.