Elizabeth R. Coffin

Paul Madden Antiquities, Sandwich, Massachusetts
Albert F. Egan, Nantucket, Massachusetts (purchased December 1983)
Albert F. Egan & Dorothy H. Egan Foundation (December 1995)

Margaret Moore Booker, Nantucket Spirit: The Art and Life of Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin, Nantucket 2001, p. 70, pl. 8.

Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin (1850-1930) was one of the most groundbreaking women artists of the Gilded Age. Coffin was born into a well-established Quaker family with founding ties to Nantucket, where she summered regularly beginning in the 1880s and lived and worked from 1900 until her death in 1930. She earned a Bachelor of Arts at Vassar College in 1870 and in 1876 was the first person in the United States to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree, also at Vassar. In 1872, Coffin was the first woman to gain admission to The Hague Academy of Fine Arts, where she spent three years and received numerous awards for her paintings. Upon returning to the States, she studied at the Arts Students League in New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she was a pupil of Thomas Eakins. She traveled extensively, often painting wherever she went, and showed widely throughout the United States in group presentations and monographic exhibitions.

Among Coffin’s larger canvases, this arrangement of chrysanthemums and daisies, set against a swag of green drapery, was perhaps inspired by the many Dutch still lifes she encountered during her studies in the Netherlands.