At time of her death in 1957, Kate Freeman Clark had been living in Holly Springs, MS. In her will she left her home and several hundred canvases and sketches from her New York years to the town of Holly Springs. She had not been painting for several years before her death, so many locals were unaware of her work.
Freeman took art classes in Memphis and New York. She enrolled in the Art Student League in New York in 1894. She spent many years learning under the painter William Merritt Chase at the Art Student League, and also at a school that Chase opened up. Freeman considered her school years to be her happiest and most productive.
In 1924, Clark ceased to create paintings and stored her paintings in the Lincoln Warehouse, New York. She’d had a number of losses in her life, and decided to return to her antebellum family home in Holly Springs, MS. She never returned to New York or painted again. Instead, she lived the life of a spinster.