Fra Broadwell Dinwiddie Dana was born into a distinguished family and grew up surrounded by books and art. In 1890, she enrolled at the Cincinnati Art Academy where she made carefully rendered drawings and perspective studies. F. Dana also learned about the new Impressionist style of artmaking with loose, immediate brushwork and light-filled compositions from Frank Duveneck (1848–1919) and Joseph Sharp (1859–1953).
Shortly after concluding her art education, F. Dana moved to Pass Creek, Wyoming with her family. In the American West, F. Dana met and eventually married Edwin Lester Dana (1864–1946). For the next thirty years, she balanced the demands of managing a prosperous cattle business on the 400,000-acre Dana ranch during the summer with her art studies and travels to New York City, where she kept an apartment, and Paris, where she had a studio, during the rest of the year.
Between 1896 and 1900, she studied with William Merritt Chase (1849–1916), including a summer residency in the Shinnecock Hills of Long Island where W. Chase encouraged students to paint en plein air. This focus on atmosphere and a fleeting application of paint is evident in her paintings, which she mostly completed in her light-filled studio at the ranch in Pass Creek.

F. Dana’s forty identified paintings are mostly signed but rarely dated. They depict the familiar world of her daily surroundings. Family and friends appear in intimate portraits, and her treasured possessions are on display in still life paintings. Her portraits show predictable sitters like her sister Edna and her neighbours but also arresting images of ranch hands and men from the Crow Tribe, including Ah Lach Chee A Koos (no date).
Most of her paintings are still lifes. These depictions of fresh fruit and fish, clay and metal vessels, and Asian ceramics reveal F. Dana’s pictorial strengths when rendering the tactile qualities of various materials and the mutable variations of light and shadow. Dana’s floral still lifes reveal her sensitive understanding of colour and a delicate application of gestural brushstrokes as in Peonies in Green Vase (no date).
Although she was surrounded by striking views of the American West, she painted only three landscape scenes. And although she maintained a life-time friendship with Modernist Alfred Maurer (1868–1932), she ignored early 20th-century art movements such as Cubism and Fauvism.

At the end of her life, F. Dana’s home was a well-appointed apartment in Great Falls, Montana, where she was surrounded by art made and collected during a lifetime that linked the rural range lands of Wyoming with the metropolitan bustle of Europe. She rarely left this private sanctuary, but an exhibition of her paintings at the University of Montana in November 1947 introduced F. Dana to an appreciative audience. This public recognition was followed by an agreement that willed her own paintings, and those by J. Sharp, W. M. Chase and A. Maurer, to the University of Montana. Over the next several decades, when Dana’s paintings appeared in regional exhibitions highlighting Western artists, she became increasingly well known. Finally, in 2011, a comprehensive exhibition of Dana’s art at the Montana Museum of Art and Culture revealed the breadth of her talent, while a biography of the artist demonstrated the range of her life experiences.