Mabel Grace Trood was a figure, landscape and still-life painter. She was born at Taunton on 16th January 1872, the youngest daughter of William Trood, a Taunton potato merchant, and his wife Myra Jane Oliver. One of her elder brothers was the animal painter William Henry Hamilton Trood (c.1853–1893). At the time of the 1891 census she was an art student living in Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London, and made several visits to the USA before the First World War. She arrived in New York on the ‘Mauretania’ from Liverpool on 4th February 1910 and is recorded on the 1910 US census in Sausalito, California. She was back in Taunton in time to be recorded in the UK census the following year. She then made two more voyages to New York, arriving on the 'Baltic' on 8th January 1912, and on the 'Oceanic' on 4th September 1913.
She appears otherwise to have lived all her life in Taunton, latterly in a council flat, and died there in Musgrave Park Hospital on 19th February 1951. Taunton Museum has a portrait of an onion seller (probably an itinerant Breton), dated 1909.
Summarised from Art UK’s Art Detective discussion ‘Did Mabel Grace Trood (d.1951) paint 'A Taunton Onion Seller'?’ and sellingantiques.co.uk
Text source: Art Detective