Frances Marian Hebert, painter, printmaker, educator, designer and craftsman, was born in Spencer, Iowa on 5 June 1899. The family moved to Three Forks, Montana in 1911 and she graduated from high school in 1916 as valedictorian of her class. She won a scholarship to the University of Montana, Missoula where she earned her B.A. in physics and mathematics in 1920. Hebert was awarded a teaching fellowship at the University of Washington, Seattle but after only a few months in the Northwest, she contacted tuberculosis and remained in a sanitarium for almost a year. Her doctors recommended a move to a drier climate so her family relocated to Whittier, California. While recuperating, she took a correspondence course in art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her family moved to Santa Barbara, California in 1925.

She continued her studies at the State Teachers College in Santa Barbara (now the University of California, Santa Barbara) and at the Santa Barbara School of the Arts where she was a student of Frank Morley Fletcher, Edward Borein, and Belmore Browne. Further studies included etching with Mauricio Lasansky, watercolor with Eliot O’Hara, and white-line (one-block) color woodcut with Cora Boone of Oakland. She was an art teacher at the Evening High School in Santa Barbara and worked under the California WPA in the late 1930s producing a body of aquatints.

Hebert was a member of and exhibited with the Santa Barbara Art Association, the Laguna Beach Art Association, the California Society of Etchers, and the Society of American Etchers. Her work was also included in the International Print Makers exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1935, as well as the International Exhibition of Etching and Engraving in 1937 and 1938, the 1937 Exposition International des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris, the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, and the American Art Today exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

During World War II she worked at the Bendix Aviation Corporation and then moved to Belton, Texas in 1946 to head the Art Department at Mary Hardin-Baylor College. She remained at Hardin-Baylor until 1957 when her health forced her to resign. Quite facile with aquatint and white-line woodcut, Hebert produced a limited body of exquisite floral imagery in both mediums. Her work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Frances Marian Hebert left Texas for the mild climate of Santa Barbara, California where she died on 15 July 1960.