She was most notable for her scenes of everyday life in Manhattan, as a member of the loosely-defined ‘Fourteenth Street School’ of artists, grouped in that precinct.

[1] Founders of a prep school in Princeton, New Jersey, her parents were highly educated individuals and descendants from East coast mercantile families.

[2] Bishop compared growing up and moving around with her parents to be like being an only child, because her siblings were fifteen plus years older than her and didn't live with her family at the time.

[1] Her mother was emotionally indifferent and distant from Bishop; she was a suffragist, feminist and aspiring writer who urged her daughters to become independent, strong women.

It was there that she studied with Guy Pène du Bois and with Kenneth Hayes Miller,[6] from whom she adapted a technique which owed much to baroque Flemish painting.

Bishop pushed against this attitude toward women artists with her insistence on applying herself both academically and politically in the art realm.

Throughout her educational ventures, she was fully funded by her father's cousin, James Bishop Ford, who aided her family in their time of need.

Her work was greatly influenced by Peter Paul Rubens and other Dutch and Flemish painters that she had discovered during trips to Europe.

[9] Bishop takes inspiration from Rubens by adding a light ochre-ish tone to all her works, allowing for the painting to be rendered in any way.

She included a Revolutionary soldier, a governor of Wisconsin, a founder of New Lexington and his grandson, an author of reference books on Ohio, the developer of the coal industry, a senator, a newspaperman, a naturalist, the county’s first historian, and General Sheridan.”[15] Bishop's mature works mainly depict the inhabitants of New York's Union Square area.

In the post-war years, Bishop's interest turned to more abstracted scenes of New Yorkers walking and traveling, in the streets or on the subways.

Her signature changed many times over her career, ranging from the use of various pseudonyms to initials; some early pieces are signed I.B, or I. Bishop in both block and script.

Her work remains significant as an example of the thematic concerns of the Fourteenth St. School, as well as her contribution to feminism and the "new woman" emerging in urban landscapes.

[18] Virgil and Dante in Union Square, 1932, Oil on canvas, Delaware Art Museum [2] This piece hung in Bishop's Riverdale home for more than seven years, and set the leitmotif of her career.

Two Girls, 1935, Oil and tempera on Masonite, Metropolitan Museum of Art [3] One of Bishop's most well-known works, the painting took more than a year to complete and was shown at the Midtown Galleries.

Her depiction of the woman as forthright and confident, approaching the man and backing him against a wall, exemplifies Bishop's understanding of shifting gender roles at the time.

The ungainly image of self-inspection accords with Bishop's realism and her interest in the daily lives of working women.