Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott
Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott
Woman with Pearls
Oil on Canvas
27 x 21 inches
31 1/2 x 25 1/4 inches in the frame
Signed Lower Right
ID: DH4698
Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott, also known as Elizabeth Boott Duveneck or “Lizzie” (1846-1888) , was an American painter known for her work in oil and watercolor, creating floral still lifes, portraits, European genre scenes, and views inspired by Italy. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she spent much of her childhood and early adulthood in Italy, where she lived with her father, composer and art critic Francis Boott, before returning to Boston at age twenty-three.
Boott studied with William Morris Hunt in Boston and later with Thomas Couture in Paris, continuing her artistic training privately with Frank Duveneck in Florence and Munich. In 1886, she married Duveneck, and the couple lived and worked in Italy and Paris. Boott died in Paris in 1888 at the age of forty, just one year after the birth of their child, reportedly from pneumonia. Following her death, Duveneck created a marble portrait of her for her grave in Florence.
During her career, Boott exhibited widely, including at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the National Academy of Design, the Boston Art Club, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London. She also held a solo exhibition at Doll & Richards Gallery in Boston in 1884, and her work was later honored in a posthumous retrospective at the Triton Museum of Art in 1979.
