Overview

Ellen came from a family of well known and respected women artists who worked in New York City and in Salisbury, Connecticut. Her cousins, Rosina Emmet Sherwood and Lydia Field Emmet were active alongside Ellen in the Stockbridge Artist Association. She studied portraiture under William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock School and Frederick MacMonnies while she was in Paris. Ellen was only one in a handful of women painters elected as a full Academician at the National Academy of Design, an enormous honor and privilege even for the best of her male contemporaries. She was primarily a portrait painter for affluent families, evening doing a portrait of Franklin Roosevelt.  Aside from finding her paintings in such collections as the National Portrait Gallery, they rarely come up in auction, usually staying with the families for whom she painted.