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Annora Brown was born in 1899 near Red Deer, Alberta and grew up in Fort MacLeod, Alberta. In the 1920s, Brown studied at the Ontario College of Art where she took classes from Arthur Lismer and J.E.H. MacDonald, members of the Canadian Group of Seven. After graduating, she briefly taught art at Mount Royal College in Calgary. In the 1930s and 1940s, Brown taught community art classes for the University of Alberta Extension department in southern Alberta and at the Banff School of Fine Arts. Brown received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lethbridge in 1971. Although best known for her flower paintings—including a commission from the Glenbow Foundation in Calgary to paint two hundred wild flowers of Western Canada—and work as a book illustrator, Brown produced many vivid and intimate pictures of her native landscape. Annora Brown passed away in 1987.