Hitchcock graduated from Brown University, and from Harvard Law School in 1874. He then turned his attention to art and became a pupil of Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre at the Académie Julian in Paris.

He attracted notice in the Paris Salon of 1885 with his Tulip Growing, of a Dutch garden he painted in the Netherlands. For years he had a studio in that country near Egmond aan Zee, where he started his "Art Summer School" that later resulted in a group of returning summer artists that informally became the Egmondse School (1890-1905). He received these students and guests at his "Huis Schuylenburgh", a large estate in Egmond aan den Hoef.

He became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour and a member of the Vienna Academy of Arts, the Munich Secession Society, and other art bodies, and is represented in the Dresden gallery, the imperial collection in Vienna, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. In 1909, he was elected to the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician.

Hitchcock married Henrietta Walker Richardson on July 6, 1881. He divorced her on July 31, 1905, and nine days later married Cecil Jay, a student at the Art Summer School who was thirty-three years his junior. The newlyweds moved to Paris, effectively ending the summer school.

At the time of his death in 1913, he was living in a houseboat in the harbor of Marken, Netherlands.

In the late 20th century, changing tastes and competition from television caused it to lose circulation. Sales of the magazine declined as the publishing company struggled. On April 24, 2014, Meredith announced it would stop publishing the magazine as a monthly with the July issue, stating it was "transitioning Ladies' Home Journal to a special interest publication". It was then available quarterly on newsstands only, though its website remained in operation. The last issue was published in 2016.

Ladies' Home Journal was one of the Seven Sisters, as a group of women's service magazines were known. The name was derived from the Greek myth of the "seven sisters", also known as the Pleiades.

The Ladies' Home Journal was developed from a popular double-page supplement in the American newspaper Tribune and Farmer titled Women at Home. Women at Home was written by Louisa Knapp Curtis, wife of the paper's publisher Cyrus H. K. Curtis. After a year it became an independent publication, with Knapp as editor for the first six years. Its original name was The Ladies' Home Journal and Practical Housekeeper, but Knapp dropped the last three words in 1886.

Knapp continued as the magazine's editor till Edward William Bok succeeded her as LHJ editor in late 1889. Knapp remained involved with the magazine's management, and she also wrote a column for each issue. In 1892, LHJ became the first magazine to refuse patent medicine advertisements.^[In 1896, Bok became Louisa Knapp's son-in-law when he married her daughter, Mary Louise Curtis. LHJ rapidly became the leading American magazine of its type, reaching a subscribed circulation of more than one million copies by 1903, the first American magazine to do so.

Bok served until 1919. Among features he introduced was the popular "Ruth Ashmore advice column" written by Isabel Mallon. At the turn of the 20th century, the magazine published the work of muckrakers and social reformers such as Jane Addams. In 1901 it published two articles highlighting the early architectural designs of Frank Lloyd Wright. The December 1909 issue included a comic strip which was the first appearance of Kewpie, created by Rose O'Neill.

Bok introduced business practices at the Ladies' Home Journal that contributed to its success: low subscription rates, inclusion of advertising to off-set costs, and reliance on popular content. This operating structure was adopted by men's magazines like McClure's and Munsey's roughly a decade after it had become the standard practice of American women's magazines. Scholars argue that women's magazines, like the Ladies' Home Journal, pioneered these strategies "magazine revolution".

There was also a controversial aspect to the magazine during Edward Bok's tenure. He authored more than twenty articles opposed to women's suffrage which threatened his "vision of the woman at home, living the simple life". He opposed the concept of women working outside the home, woman's clubs, and education for women. He wrote that feminism would lead women to divorce, ill health, and even death. Bok solicited articles against women's rights from former presidents Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt (though Roosevelt would later change his mind to become a supporter of women's suffrage). Bok viewed suffragists as traitors to their sex, saying "there is no greater enemy of woman than woman herself."

During World War II, the Ladies' Home Journal was a particularly favored venue of the government to place articles intended for homemakers, in an effort to keep up morale and support.

The annual subscription price paid for the production of the magazine and its mailing. The profits came from heavy advertising, pitched to families with above-average incomes of $1,000 to $3,000 in 1900. In the 1910s it carried about a third of the advertising in all women's magazines. By 1929 it had nearly twice as much advertising as any other publication except for the Saturday Evening Post, which was also published by the Curtis family. The Ladies' Home Journal was sold to 2 million subscribers in the mid-1920s, grew a little during the depression years, and surged again during post-World War II prosperity. By 1955, each issue sold 4.6 million copies and there were probably 11 million readers.