Adelaide Cole grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, where as a child in the late 1870s she was occasionally the subject of drawings by her father's friend Winslow Homer. Her father, J. Foxcroft Cole, was also an artist. She received a general education in several Boston schools before initiating her formal art study at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under Edmund Tarbell. She then went on to Paris, where she was a pupil of Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran. Her 1892 marriage to William Chester Chase did not end her painting career, and by 1903, she had sufficient standing in New York to be elected to the Society of American Artists.
Chase's first work exhibited in an Academy annual was a Portrait of Mrs. Tappan Francis in 1905. The following year, she became an Associate through the merger of the Academy and the Society of American Artists. She continued exhibiting portraits at the Academy yearly until 1913, after which she was only a sporadic contributor. Among her honors was a Silver Medal at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis of 1904.
