[3][a] John Sparhawk Jones was a clergyman at the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore's Bolton Hill[3][b] until 1890.

[6] Elizabeth's first love was Morton Livingston Schamberg, who was a fellow artist and student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In 1906, she was persuaded by her parents to turn down the coveted two-year traveling scholarship from PAFA, which would have had her in Paris at the same time as Schamberg.

[16] Elizabeth became exhausted from her career efforts, the strain in the relationship with her sister Margaret, and family financial losses.

[6] Edwin Arlington Robinson (1868–1935), a Pulitzer Prize winning poet,[3] and Sparhawk-Jones visited the MacDowell Colony at the same times over a cumulative total of ten years.

[23] Sparhawk-Jones was known for her humor and wit, but confided in a 1964 oral history interview that she always felt lonely, preferring a quiet lifestyle.

[3] Sparhawk-Jones lived part of her adult life in and around Philadelphia, including the rural Westtown Township, Pennsylvania.

[6] She received letters of encouragement and critiques by William Merritt Chase,[3] who taught a portrait and life class.

[6] During one of the summers at PAFA, she studied in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, where she found the life drawing classes freer than in the United States.

[32] The Journal of the American Medical Association, which used Shoe Shop as its March 24, 1999 cover, described Sparhawk-Jones as "witty, spirited, and talented".

[3] Her painting Shop Girls c. 1912 was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago as part of an intention to pick "eye-popping" or "little masterpieces of compactness and stimulation" from American artists' works of the late 19th century and early 20th-century.

[35][24] The painting was made into a poster in the 1980s by the New York Department of Labor,[36] which had the following quotation: Over the years, radically different images have helped to shape America's ever changing view of the world of work.

Around the time "Shop Girls" was being painted, 154 workers, mostly young women, died in the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of 1911 in New York City...

Despite the obstacles, despite the stereotypes imposed by society, theirs is a revolution still in the making.She hit a low point in her career when she suffered from mental illness[6] and was admitted to an asylum in 1913.

[6] In 1928,[41] she was a resident at Yaddo,[6][42] a 400-acre estate and artist community in Saratoga Springs, New York founded by Spencer and Katrina Trask.

[10] Other former Yaddo residents include Langston Hughes, Katherine Anne Porter, Truman Capote, and Sylvia Plath.

[43] For two or three years, she lived and worked in Florida at the Research Institute (now Maitland Art Center), which was run by Mary Louise Curtis Bok, later the wife of Efrem Zimbalist, and Andre Smith.

[44] She encouraged gallery and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts shows of the works of self-taught Horace Pippin, of whom she said: "For me he is one of the few real artists in our century, when he is at his best.

Of her talent, realized in the painting, Marsden Hartley said, "It seems to be with something of a mental rapier that she conceives her subject matter for [her] pictures border on the exceptionally forceful and they are different in thought, as well as execution, from the work of most of the soft painters among men and women.

[48] Sparhawk-Jones was called a phenomenon in 1944 in an American Artist magazine, in which the author questioned, "Strange, that she is not recognized far and wide as among the ablest, most distinguished women painters in the United States.

[3] Papers about Sparhawk-Jones' career, including exhibition catalogs, sketches, artist's statements, and newspaper clippings are held at the Victor Building in the Smithsonian American Art Museum / National Portrait Gallery Library.

[52] In 2010, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones: The Artist Who Lived Twice, a biography of her life, was written and published by Barbara Lehman Smith.