Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin (1850–1930) was an American artist, educator and philanthropist who is known for her paintings of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Rebecca Coffin, nicknamed "Lizzie",[1] was born September 9, 1850, in Brooklyn, New York,[2] into a Quaker family.

[5] She studied at the Friends Seminary in New York City before attending Vassar College,[4] where she was taught by the Dutch painter Henry Van Ingen.

Coffin studied at the Hague Academy for three years[7] and received medals for anatomy, composition, perspective and antique drawing.

Her Hanging the Nets was exhibited in 1892 at the National Academy of Design and won the Norman W. Dodge Prize for the best picture by a woman.

[10] She was one of the "New Woman" of the 19th century successful, highly trained women artists who did not marry, like Ellen Day Hale, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Nourse and Cecilia Beaux.

Until Coffin taught basketmaking, baskets were traditionally made by boys and retired sea-faring men on Nantucket.

[1] Coffin reopened the school during a period when the whaling industry, which had been the economic backbone of the island, had ended.

[2] In 1927 she sailed from Southampton, England to New York on the SS Nieuw Amsterdam with Fred Coffin, who was born in 1873 and lived at 30 Remsen Street in Brooklyn.

[17] In the death of Elizabeth R. Coffin on June 21, the class of 1870 has lost not only one of its best loved members but also a woman who, like her class-mate Ellen Swallow Richards, made a distinguished contribution to American life.A retrospective of her work was held at Vassar in 1920 during her 50th class reunion; Taylor Hall exhibited more than 70 of her works.

Whaling, the isolation of the island, and Quakerism all played roles in providing a unique environment in which Nantucket women had freedoms which their counterparts in the rest of America and the world did not during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.