Elizabeth Coffin

Who was Elizabeth Coffin?

Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin was an artist, educator and philanthropist who is known for her paintings of Nantucket.

Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin was born in 1850 in Brooklyn, New York, into Quaker family. She was an eighth-generation descendant of the original Nantucket settlers Tristram and Dionis Coffin.

She studied at Vassar College, where she was taught by the Dutch painter Henry Van Ingen. In 1872 she enrolled at the Hague Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied for three years, the first woman to gain admission to this school. She later studied at the Art Students League of New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She also traveled extensively in Europe and California. Coffin was a pupil of Thomas Eakins.

Coffin began to summer regularly on Nantucket, starting in the 1880s, and moved there in 1900. She painted in the American Realist style. Her paintings preserved the way of life of Nantucket, now no longer a whaling port. Her Hanging the Nets was exhibited in 1892 at the National Academy of Design. It won the Norman W. Dodge Prize for the best picture ever painted by a woman in the United States.

In her later years she put most of her energy into reviving handicraft instruction at the Coffin School.