Painter and printmaker Florence Terry (née Florence E. Beach) was born in Hays, Kansas on June 9, 1880. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to the West Coast to study at the University of Washington in Seattle in the late 1910s. She married Clyde Caspar Terry in 1915 and two years later their son Roland was born. In 1919, Clyde died and the family relocated to Florence's mother's residence in Compton, California. Terry divided her time throughout the 1920s and early 1930s between the two families in California and Washington. The support likely allowed her some modicum of independence, as she was able to study at the New York School of Art and privately with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, and with Gertrude Estabrooks in Chicago.

In 1933 Terry moved to Kansas City, Missouri and she was employed for a time as the head of the art department at Ottawa University, Kansas. In 1935 Roland began his studies in architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 1937 he and his mother designed a house in Seattle, Washington that she moved into. She exhibited at the Seattle Art Museum in 1936, 1939, and 1940, and at the City of Paris department store in San Francisco in 1938.

Florence Terry remained in Seattle until her death on May 2, 1958.