Elizabeth Boott

Elizabeth Otis Lyman Boott (April 13, 1846 – March 22, 1888) was an American painter of still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. She was the daughter of the classical music composer Francis Boott and Elizabeth (née Lyman) Boott. She married Frank Duveneck, her former teacher, and lived in the Villa Castellini in Florence.

Early life and education

Boott was born on April 13, 1846, in Boston, Massachusetts. She was the daughter of the composer Francis Boott and Elizabeth (née Lyman) Boott. Her mother, who died when she was 18 months old, was the eldest daughter of Boston Brahmin George Lyman and his first wife, who was the daughter of Harrison Gray Otis.

Boott was raised by her father in Italy. The pair returned to Boston in 1865.

Boott enrolled at the William Morris Hunt class for women in Boston in 1869, and also studied with Thomas Couture outside Paris for three consecutive summers (1876-1878).

She lived later in Paris with her husband and son. She died there on March 22, 1888, of pneumonia.

Villa Castellini in Florence

Boott encouraged her teacher Frank Duveneck to move to Florence, with the idea of having him teach a class of women artists - instruction of a sort that was just then coming into vogue.

In the fall of 1879, after nearly a decade in Munich, Duveneck moved to Florence and more than a dozen of his painter friends came with him. They settled at the Villa Castellani, now the Villa Mercede, at Bellosguardo, designed in the 15th century by a follower of Michelangelo and owned in the 19th by a Boston family, who rented out to friends the spacious apartments that surrounded the villa's arcaded center court.

Exhibitions 1883: American Water Color Society 1883: Boston Art Club 1883: National Academy of Design 1883: Boston Museum of Fine Arts 1883: Philadelphia Society of Artists 1884: Doll & Richards Gallery – Boston 1886: Paris Salon

Gallery