Isabel Bishop (Mrs. Harold G. Wolfe) painter, etcher, and teacher was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on March 3, 1902.  Her early childhood years were spent in Detroit, Michigan where she took up her first formal art training at the Wicker Art School.  In 1918, at age sixteen, Bishop went to New York to study illustration at the New York School of Applied Design for Women.  She also had brief instruction at the Moore Institute.  It was her studies at the Art Students League in New York under Kenneth Hayes Miller and Guy Pene du Bois that had the greatest impact on her professional career.  DuBois made her aware of character and personality differences.  Miller inspired her to turn to the street life of New York for subject matter and insisted on fine draftsmanship.  She later traveled with Miller and Reginald Marsh in Europe in 1931 to study the Old Masters.

Isabel Bishop worked at painting, drawing and etching for many years in a studio on New York's Union Square.  Typical subjects of Bishop were "two girls in the subway, one girl eating ice cream, an old man sewing in the park, an old man leaning over to pick up a cigar butt, etc. Her people are what they are no more, no less.  But they are very much what they are---they never are what they are not; for her perception cuts to the truth.  Her art is at once original and traditional as is that of Thomas Eakins." (Reginald Marsh) Bishop's output was small owing to much erasing and reworking in her art.

She built up her easel paintings in various layers of tempera and oil over usually a gray striped gesso ground, which was seen through transparently or semi-transparently with opaque touches that radiated and shimmered in delicate touches of color and gray.  Her works in this style were said to "sparkle, grow weak, dissolve, reappear, pass again into solid points of relief, move here, move there, suggesting the style of matchless sketches of Reubens; they give great delight."  These misty semi-transparent works appear limitless in space.

She was also known for genre, portraits, streets, parks, children, nudes, subway and hot dogs.  Although her early works were mostly that of easel paintings, Bishop was a leading printmaker on the New York City art scene during the end of the first quarter and early middle part of the 20th century.  Her printed matter took on the same subjects as her earlier mixed media works, social realism depicting the everyday urban life of common people in lower Manhattan.  Along with Reginald Marsh, Moses and Raphael Soyer and many others, Bishop was an outstanding, determined realist when Abstract Expressionism was the all-prevalent style.

Bishop, along with many of the other "turn-of-the-century" artists holding true to their early artistic convictions lost favor with the critics and art patrons to the new school of Abstract Expressionism, Modernism and the like.  Today, long after the re-discovery of this preserved purists group their works are eagerly sought after.  She taught at the Art Students' League from 1936 to 1937 and was a life member.  In 1938, she worked as a Muralist for the W.P.A., and did a mural for the U.S. Post Office in New Lexington, Ohio, and also illustrated the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice (Book of the Month Club edition 1946).  Bishop also taught at Yale and Skowhegan Art School, Maine.

She was a member of the National Academy of Design; National Institute of Arts and Letters; Society of American Etchers, Gravers, Lithographers, and Woodcutters; Art Students' League, an American Group and others. Bishop exhibited extensively during her life including Berkshire Museum; Whitney; Midtown Galleries, NYC; Venice Biennials and other.  She won awards for her work at he American Artists Group, etching; National Academy of Design; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; American Society of Graphic Artists; National Arts Club; Audubon Artists; Royal Society of Arts, London and others. She is represented in numerous important public and private collections.  Bishop passed away in New York City in 1988.