This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Born in Boston and the only child of Cyrus A. Bartol, a Unitarian minister, Elizabeth Bartol was a painter of portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and also a sculptor, metalworker and poster designer. She was a descendant of prominent Bostonians who were followers of Ralph Waldo Emerson and whose circle of friends included Louisa Mae Alcott, Bronson Alcott, William Morris Hunt, Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, and women's rights activists including Lucia Peabody and Abby May.
One of her close life-long friends, beginning from childhood as neighbors, was Laura Marquand who later married artist Henry Oliver Walker and became a noted embroiderer of fabric floral designs. In her autobiography, Laura Walker credited Bartol, whom she called Lizzie, with early exposure to culture, gentility and intellectual topics especially through a discussion club where "the great questions of morality and ethics were freely discussed by as fine and clear-headed women as could be found anywhere." (Meyers, 21)
Bartol studied at the Boston School of Design and was credited as "one of the better students of William Morris Hunt." (Heller, 51) She also studied with William Rimmer and Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman. In 1875, she traveled to France, Italy, and England with Sarah Wyman Whitman and worked with Thomas Couture at Villiers-le-Bel in 1877.
She returned to Boston where she had a studio and exhibited at the William & Everett Gallery in 1888 and the Boston Art Club between 1874 and 1886. She also exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1876 and 1877.
She gave up painting in the last decade of the 19th century due to frail health. She donated her paintings, furniture and prints to the Boston Museum, and examples of her work are in the Lancaster Historical Society of Massachusetts.
Written by Lonnie Pierson Dunbier
Sources:
Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own
Fern K. Meyers, Beyond A Gilded Cage: Recollections of Laura Marquand Walker
Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller, North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
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