Elizabeth Honor Dolan

Artist Biography

The daughter of Irish immigrants, Elizabeth Dolan moved to Nebraska with her family at a young age. She became a nationally regarded fresco painter who completed murals throughout Lincoln. Her most well-known work, The Spirit of the Prairie, was painted for the Nebraska State Capitol Law Library and depicts a mother overlooking the land. Untitled depicts similar content and is a sketch for that mural, among several created by Dolan with the theme of mother and prairie. Elizabeth Honor Dolan was one of the few women artists of her time able to work as a self-supporting professional artist without supplementing her income by teaching. Though many may not know her name, her public murals around Lincoln, Nebraska, have become a ubiquitous backdrop for those living in or visiting the city. Her work can be found at the State Museum of Natural History in Morrill Hall, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Student Union, the Law Library at the Nebraska State Capitol, the Bennett Martin Public Library, and in countless private homes as framed paintings or permanent wall murals. Enchanted Landscape, likely painted during her peak years of production from the 1920s to the 1940s, demonstrates her softly toned color palette, gentle wash paint application, and romanticized approach that was the hallmark of her education in fresco wall painting under Francis Garguit at the Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts in France.