Born to a wealthy Boston family and educated in Italy, Lizzie Boott was an accomplished artist. She studied with painter Frank Duveneck, and married him in 1886. When she died less than two years later, Duveneck created this sculpture in her memory, evoking tomb effigies of the Renaissance. Lizzie’s arms are folded and a palm branch (the Christian symbol for victory over death), is arranged along her body.

A bronze version of this sculpture adorns Boott’s grave in Florence’s Allori cemetery, and her father commissioned this marble version for the MFA. The novelist Henry James, a close family friend, wrote: “One is touched to tears by this particular example which comes home to one so—of the jolly great truth that it is art alone that triumphs over fate.”

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