Family wealth allowed her to pursue the multiple facets of her career free of worries about critical reception or the income that her work would bring her.

At the beginning of her career she won the top prize in the first annual exhibition of American block prints held by the Philadelphia Print Club, a book she wrote mid-career won a reviewer's unqualified praise, and, late in her career, the director of an art center praised her "forthright choice of natural subjects" and said her work conveyed "the beauty, wit and charm of factual reality".

[3] From kindergarten through twelfth grade she attended the Horace Mann School, a liberal co-educational component of Columbia Teachers College located on the campus of the university.

[3] Boas and fellow teacher, Lucia Williams Dement, taught using an innovative method that aimed, as they wrote, "toward individuality of expression".

[4][note 1] Although the family's wealth ensured that Bischoff would not need to earn a living, her mother encouraged her to attend a school where she could learn a useful trade.

After graduating from Horace Mann in 1919, she consequently enrolled in the New York School of Applied Design for Women where she received good applied-arts training in how to make meticulously accurate drawings of flowers.

[3] Her fluency in German gave her an advantage when, beginning in 1922, she began to make regular trips to Germany and other European countries to study art.

[3][note 2] Her longest period of foreign travel came in about 1927-1928 when she interrupted her training at the Art Students League to study privately in Munich under the German portraitist and printmaker, Georg Buchner (1858–1914).

Describing its subject as "two peasant women, bowed beneath the weight of heavily laden baskets on their backs, who are proceeding wearily along a road", a critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer praised its "fascinating conception".

[8] A year later, Bischoff showed block prints and drawings with watercolor washes in a solo exhibition at the Ferargil Galleries in New York.

[11] Writing in Parnassus, Gertrude A. Rothschild said Bischoff's block print showed "fine restraint" in portraying "the sensation-hungry faces at a bullfight".

[23] Bischoff retained the painting and, in 1948, gave it to the gallery of Dartmouth College, located a few miles from her summer home in Hartland.

Writing in the Rutland Daily Herald on July 10, Tom Slayton said the paintings she showed were "technically superb" but conveyed "synthetic emotion".

The quote praised Bischoff's "skillful, precise drawing, her delicate, sure coloring, and her forthright choice of natural subjects" and said her work conveyed "the beauty, wit and charm of factual reality".

[1] On July 19, writing in the Bennington Banner, Jerome Wichelns called her paintings "stereotyped and imitative and very much wanting in originality".

In an oral history interview, held late in her life, she said, "I've had wonderful cleanings out of my studios when I've gone like a whirlwind through things and torn them up, put them in the fire.

Committed to her own version of realism from an early date, she did not become aware of pure abstraction until well into her career and once she had encountered it, she rejected it as a style.

Although Bischoff was primarily known as a book illustrator throughout virtually all of her career, contemporary sources give only indirect information on the origins and progress of her work in that field.

[32] A reviewer said that in the second of them she had "expressed perfectly the gayety of spirit that animated the author in immortalizing some seventy-eight places surrounding the village of Manhattan.

A reviewer wrote, "This is a lovely little book to read and to handle, of a distinguished size and shape, and decorated with Ilse Bischoff's sensitive drawings".

In 1982 she said her favorite illustrated book was Gigi; the Story of a Merry-go-round Horse, by Elizabeth Foster (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1943).

A newspaper reproduced one of her illustrations in its review of the 1949 edition of a fourteen-volume encyclopedia, Childcraft (Chicago, Field Enterprises) saying, "The spirit of heraldry and chivalry characteristic of the Middle Ages is vividly expressed in this drawing by Ilse Bischoff".

Miss Bischoff's illustrations present the staid splendor of the castle and the robustiousness of peasant life with equal grace".

[41] A reviewer for the Chicago Tribune summarized the plot and wrote, "The story, although not especially original, will appeal to youngsters for its loving boy-dog relationship.

[42] A reviewer for the Louisville Courier-Journal said, "the illustrations give color, intensity and more meaning to the tale of one little Hungarian Prince Rudolf and his remarkable poodle.

The first on Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun and the second on Étienne Maurice Falconet, both 18th-century French artists who worked in Imperial Russia.

[45][46] She said she had wanted to publish a full biography of Vigée Le Brun but could not find enough information about her life and wrote the article instead.

[47] Having grown up speaking German with her parents and siblings and having traveled extensively in Europe throughout her life, Bischoff later came to believe that she missed out on the immersion in American culture that was common among the artists with whom she associated.

[3] In the 1940s, Bischoff and her sister began buying fine porcelain pieces by Meissen and Nymphenburg mainly from German refugees in America.