Painter, water colorist and etcher Mabel Oliver was born in Cambridge. She trained at the Slade School, London and subsequently married Luther Charles Frederick Parker in 1893. She became a skilled etcher and typically signed her etchings with the pseudonym “M. Oliver Rae” to obscure her gender and thus make her etchings of pastoral English villages and the schools and colleges of Oxford and Cambridge more easy to market. She died in Mildenhall, Suffolk.