Fanny Bowditch Dixwell Holmes was an artist — a serious artist whose work was publicly exhibited in Boston and New York and reviewed nationally by critics in publications like Scribner’s Monthly and The Nation. The painter William Morris Hunt once said that Fanny was “the only really creative artist beside himself in America.” Her medium was embroidery, but the source of her fame and distinction was her destruction of the barrier between the decorative arts and the fine arts. Critics were amazed by her use of thread in a painterly way to render landscapes that seemed to move as if in a wind. She was said to have created a new art, but today just a few scraps of her embroidery are known to have survived.