Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts was born on June 10, 1871 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of well-to-do parents, G. Theodore and Sarah (Green) Roberts. They spent their summers in New Hampshire where Elizabeth, known to her friends as "Elsie, " early revealed talent for outdoor sketching.
She was given the best masters - Elizabeth Bonsall and Henry R. Poore in Philadelphia, and Tony Robert-Fleury, Jules Lefebvre, and Luc-Olivier Merson in Paris - and in 1889 she was awarded the Mary Smith Prize of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At the Paris Salon, 1892, she received honorable mention. From Paris her studies extended into Italy where she gave special attention to Botticelli and other masters of religious art.
She returned to the United States after six years' study and for a short time she had a studio in New York. During a summer at the Emerson house, Concord, Massachussets, while she was engaged in making a series of paintings of the historic and literary landmarks of the neighborhood, she formed friendships and associations that induced her to establish an all-year residence at Concord.
Her services to American art and her assistance to other artists were even more remarkable than her own professional achievement, highly creditable though the latter was. She devoted much of her large income to forwarding the exhibitions of the Concord Art Association which under her management were of metropolitan quality. Sedulously following the seasonal exhibitions of the principal cities, she secured for the annual summer show at Concord many of the finest paintings and sculptures, and she offered generous prizes and bought many works of art for the association's permanent collection.
The catalogues of these exhibitions, which Miss Roberts wrote, were models of biographical completeness and accuracy. She served also as president of the Concord Antiquarian Society. While engaged in these and other activities Miss Roberts painted proficiently and with fervor: at first religious paintings, some of them mural decorations for the Church of St. Asaph, Bala, Pennsylvania; many sketchy seascapes, made at Cape Ann and elsewhere, exquisite in tone, refined in color; and occasionally a larger, more ambitious conversation piece, such as her full-size portrait of such veterans of the Civil War as survived at Concord after the World War.
The last-named work, now owned by the town of Concord, was favorably criticized by John Singer Sargent. During the World War Miss Roberts organized in New York and Boston several exhibitions of her "Figures on the Sand" which were sold for the benefit of the war sufferers in France. "Painted in a thin, rapidly wrought medium, her pictures of the broad and shining expanse of sand beach showing the North Shore, with the agile, buoyant, active figures of children at play or wading or swimming or digging against the splendid background of the blue ocean, are brilliant and luminous in the extreme, and notable for their expression of atmospheric spaciousness. The bigness and freedom of these scenes lend them a joyous and stimulating charm which is unique. "
Miss Roberts was following her useful and outwardly pleasant career when she shocked her many friends by taking her life at her Concord home. She left to the Concord Art Association its building which shortly after her death housed a memorial exhibition of her works.
In 1926, she was diagnosed with psychoneurosis and admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital. She hung herself on March 12, 1927, the same day her father died, at her home in Concord.
She established the Jennie Sesnan Gold Medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she had studied and won the Mary Smith Prize. In Massachusetts, Roberts founded and funded the Concord Art Association. She was given the best masters - Elizabeth Bonsall and Henry R. Poore in Philadelphia, and Tony Robert-Fleury, Jules Lefebvre, and Luc-Olivier Merson in Paris - and in 1889 she was awarded the Mary Smith Prize of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At the Paris Salon, 1892, she received honorable mention. From Paris her studies extended into Italy where she gave special attention to Botticelli and other masters of religious art.
She was physically frail, emotionally subject to periods of deep melancholy.
