Elizabeth R. Coffin

Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin was born on September 9, 1850, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Quaker family with Nantucket roots reaching back to the island's original English settlers, Tristram and Dionis Coffin. She attended Quaker schools and the Friends Seminary in New York before entering Vassar College, where she also studied astronomy with Maria Mitchell. She earned her B.A. in 1870 and returned to Vassar in 1876 to take what is described as the first graduate degree in fine arts awarded by an American institution.

Between those two Vassar degrees, Coffin spent about three years, from 1872 to 1875, studying at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where she was among the first women admitted and won medals in anatomy, composition, perspective, and antique drawing. Back in the United States, she continued her training at the Art Students League of New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she studied under Thomas Eakins.

She exhibited at the National Academy of Design, winning the Norman W. Dodge Prize in 1892 for Hanging the Nets and again in 1902, and she showed work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She is associated with a trip to Biskra, in Algeria, where she produced Orientalist subject paintings, including The Old Falconer of Ben Gana, Sheik of the Ziban; the exact date of the trip is not firmly documented in the sources reviewed.

Coffin began summering on Nantucket in the 1880s and settled there permanently around 1900. Her painting output slowed as she turned her attention to the Coffin School, teaching handicrafts and supporting the island's cultural institutions. In 1920, Vassar mounted a retrospective of more than seventy of her works in Taylor Hall to mark her fiftieth class reunion. She died on June 21, 1930, at her home on Lily Street in Nantucket, and was buried at the Friends Cemetery at Prospect Park in Brooklyn.

Coffin's reputation rests heavily on institutional recognition rather than a body of contemporaneous critical writing. The Nantucket Historical Association, which holds a significant group of her paintings, describes her as the island's most important female artist. Her early academic honors, the Hague Academy medals, two Dodge Prizes at the National Academy of Design, and her frequently cited status as the first person in the country to earn a fine-arts graduate degree, mark her as a serious product of the era's most rigorous academic training, including study under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy. Her later Orientalist work associated with a trip to Algeria and her Nantucket genre paintings are the two poles most often discussed by the institutions that hold her work, though neither a dedicated catalogue nor a substantial body of independent art criticism appears to survive.

Coffin's auction record is The Old Falconer of Ben Gana, Sheik of the Ziban, which sold for USD 100,800 including premium at Sotheby's New York in 2022, the exact sale date is not confirmed in the sources reviewed. That result is a significant outlier relative to the rest of her documented market: most of her work that reaches auction, largely portraits and Nantucket genre scenes, sells at regional and estate houses such as Rafael Osona Auction and Case Antiques, often in the low hundreds to low thousands of dollars. Her market is thin and infrequent, driven more by regional and institutional collecting interest around Nantucket and Vassar than by broad secondary-market demand.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Coffin, and no active gallery or estate representation could be confirmed. Verification in practice depends on the institutions that hold her work, chiefly the Nantucket Historical Association, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, and the Coffin School, along with the auction houses that have brought pieces to market. Her results vary widely by subject and quality, from modest regional sale prices to the six-figure Sotheby's result for an Orientalist Algerian scene, so collectors should weigh provenance and subject matter carefully rather than assume a single price level applies across her output.