Timaru-born Elizabeth Rosa Sawtell grew up in Ōtautahi / Christchurch and was a foundation student at Canterbury College School of Art in 1882. In the 1890s she was also a prominent member of the Palette Club, a local group that promoted plein-air painting. Sawtell found artistic inspiration in the weekend baches of Te Onepoto / Taylors Mistake, and this locale continued to draw her back. Towards the end of a long painting career, her charming landscape and seascape studies of the sea and hills round Scarborough were considered among her finest.

(Te Wheke, 2020)