Sarah Ann Clarke, a New England Transcendentalist and an artist, at one time was a patron and drawing teacher at
Amos Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1830s. She participated in
Margaret Fuller’s Conversations in Boston between 1839 and 1844 as well as in Alcott’s Conversations in Boston between 1848 and 1853. In 1843 she accompanied her brother
James Freeman Clarke and Fuller on a trip to the Great Lakes, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin Territory; this excursion provided the basis for Fuller’s first book,
Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844).