“The Best Tree Tea” Illustration

After the death of Ray’s father, Alexander, she moved across the country to New York with her mother, Edna. There Ray enrolled at the May Friend Bennett School, a progressive women’s college with a robust program for the arts. She studied under the sculptor Lucinda Davies, who was better known as Lu Duble. Davies had been a student of the painter Hans Hofmann in Germany, and she encouraged Ray to seek him out in Manhattan. Ray remained in Millbrook until the summer of 1933.