 Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott is primarily known as Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott (Lizzie) Duveneck
|
|
Ad Code: 3
|
An example of work by Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
|
|
|
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Known as "Lizzie," Elizabeth Boott Duveneck had a promising career cut
short by her early death. She was a serious painter intent on a
professional career and studied throughout Europe and also in the
United States with William Morris Hunt. She was born to a
prominent, cultured Boston family and became so refined that Henry
James described her as "the infinitely civilized and sympathetic, the
markedly produced Lizzie."
Her travels included study in Munich
and Italy with Frank Duveneck, study at the Academy Julian in Paris,
and in 1883, a trip to Aiken, South Carolina where she painted
portraits of five African-American farm workers.
After a
successful solo exhibition in Boston, she exhibited at the Chase
Gallery, the National Academy of Design, and in 1884 at the Associated
Artists in New York City. Two years later in Paris, she married artist
Frank Duveneck to whom she had been engaged since 1881, but died from
pneumonia four years later, and was buried near her childhood home at
Bellosguardo, Italy.
Sources include:
Erica E. Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own
Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Artists
|
Biography from Charleston Renaissance Gallery:
| ELIZABETH BOOTT DUVENECK (1846-1888)
Elizabeth Boott Duveneck's life reads like a Jamesian novel. She was, in fact, along with her widowed father, a model for characters in "Portrait of a Lady" (1881), "The Golden Bowl" (1904) and several other novels and stories by Henry James.
Elizabeth, known always as Lizzie, was raised in a privileged and cosmopolitan environment. Her mother, Elizabeth Lyman Boott, was the eldest daughter of Boston Brahmin George Lyman and his first wife, the daughter of Harrison Gray Otis. Her father, Francis Boott, was a composer and music critic. Mrs. Boott, like so many others of her generation, suffered from lung trouble. At the advice of the family's physician, her husband took her south, hoping the warmer clime of Charleston might prove beneficial. Unfortunately, the disease was too far advanced, and in 1847 she passed away, leaving behind a deeply bereaved husband and an eighteen-month-old daughter (Duveneck, p. 101).
The social climate in mid-nineteenth century Boston was not felicitous for the arts, and Boott found himself at odds with the society to which he belonged. Shortly after his wife's death, he took Lizzie to Europe. There they divided their seasons between various locations, eventually settling in the Villa Castellani at Bellosguardo, overlooking Florence. As part of that city's Anglo-American community, the Bootts enjoyed a companionable life dominated by music, painting, good food and lively conversation.
Francis Boott undertook for himself the serious study of musical composition and saw to it that his young daughter had lessons in everything: piano, voice, violin, French, Italian, Latin, drawing, painting, riding and swimming (Duveneck, p. 106).
Lizzie's interest in drawing was encouraged by her father, who carefully preserved all of her early sketches and watercolors.In 1865 the Bootts returned to Boston, where nineteen-year-old Lizzie became friends with Alice, William and, especially, Henry James, who found her infinitely "civilized and produced . . . educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in a rich old medium" (Duveneck Papers, reel 1151, frame 639).
The James and Boott families spent part of the summer of 1869 together at a farmhouse in Pomfret, New York. Through this association, Lizzie came to know William Morris Hunt and entered the class for women artists he was just forming in Boston. Hunt was an influential artist and critic, whose modern French aesthetic principles were the antithesis of traditional academic methods. His richly painted landscapes and his proselytizing for French paintings by the Barbizon school inspired a movement among Boston artists, setting them against the realist style of the Hudson River School, which still prevailed in New York.
Taught by Hunt to admire the Barbizon tradition of painting directly from nature, Lizzie viewed Corot and Millet as the greatest of modern masters (Osborne, Apollo, p. 44). While in Boston Lizzie attended an exhibition of the radical new Midwestern painter Frank Duveneck and was sufficiently impressed to buy a portrait. In 1880, while studying with Thomas Couture at Villiers-le-Bel, France, she took a side trip to Venice to seek out Duveneck, and decided to work with him as a private student in Munich the following summer. During this tutelage, the two fell in love, to the horror of Lizzie's father, who considered Duveneck a fine artist, but a boorish individual, totally unsuitable for his well-bred daughter. Henry James was also displeased. He later wrote: 'For him it is all gain, for her it is very brave' (Duveneck, p. 116).
Though Lizzie and Duveneck continued to see each other, they did not marry until 1886. In the interim, she applied herself to her work with ever greater concentration, keeping up a full schedule of painting and exhibiting. Her first show was a joint one with fellow artist Annie Dixwell in Boston at J. Eastman Chase's gallery. This was followed by submission throughout 1883 to the American Water Color Society, the Boston Art Club, the Society of American Artists, the Pennsylvania Academy, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Society of Artists.
A trip that year to the American South produced five portraits of black farm workers and two genre scenes, both with the same title. All these endeavors culminated in a large, well received one-person show at Doll and Richards Gallery in Boston in 1884.
On March 25, 1886, despite her father's concerns, Lizzie Boott and Frank Duveneck were married before a justice of the peace in Paris. After their wedding, they painted and lived with her father at the Villa Castellani. Remembering the death of his own wife forty years earlier, Francis Boott was anxious when his daughter became pregnant at the age of forty. After the birth of her son in December 1886, Lizzie wrote, "It seems strange after so many years of spinsterhood to get so much domestic life in so short a time." And later, "I am beginning to work again, though not very steadily for the baby is very absorbing. I find I am constantly thinking about him and wondering in my ignorance if everything is done that ought to be" (Duveneck, p. 118).
In October 1887, in search of more artistic opportunities for Duveneck, the couple moved to Paris. Lizzie, busy with the baby, household tasks and long hours posing for Frank'¦s full-length portrait of her (which was intended for the Paris Salon), caught a chill in the cold Parisian winter. Her ailment rapidly developed into pneumonia, and four days later she died, leaving Duveneck alone with their twenty-month old son. At the insistence of Francis Boott, the child was sent to relatives in Boston who could ensure his proper upbringing.
Frank Duveneck returned to Cincinnati. He sculpted a memorial to his wife, a bronze version of which was placed at her tomb in Florence's Allori Cemetery in 1891. Francis Boott so admired this personification of his daughter that he asked Duveneck to create a marble version to be displayed in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, where Lizzie's son and her many friends might see it.
Nancy Rivard Shaw, 2000 @Robert M. Hicklin Jr., Inc
References:
"Frank and Elizabeth Boott" Duveneck Papers, reel 1151.
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Duveneck, Josephine W. "Frank Duveneck: Painter-Teacher". San Francisco: John Howell Books, 1970.
Osborne, Carol M. "Frank Duveneck & Elizabeth Boott: An American Romance," in Duveneck: Frank Duveneck & Elizabeth Boott Duveneck. New York: Owen Gallery, 1996.
Osborne, Carol M. "Lizzie Boott at Bellosguardo", in The Italian Presence in American Art, 1860-1920. Edited by Irma B. Jaffe. New York: Fordham University Press; Rome: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1992.
Osborne, Carol M. "The Picture Season at Villiers-le-Bel, 1876-78: Elizabeth Boott, Thomas Couture, and Henry James," Apollo 149, no. 447 (May 1999), pp. 40-51. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|