Elizabeth Violet Polunin was born Elizabeth Violet Hart in Ashford Kent in 1878 [1] After studying in Paris at the Atelier Colarossi with Lucien Simon and at the École des Beaux-Arts, she travelled to St. Petersburg, Russia where she met and studied under Leon Bakst. Whilst in Russia she married the artist Vladimir Jacolievitch Polunin (1880-1957) and returned to England with him c. 1908. Following her return, she studied briefly at Westminster School of Art in London with Walter Sickert (1860-1942) as her principal tutor. She also began teaching on a part-time basis at the Slade School of Fine Art in London with her husband.

In 1918 Sergei Diaghilev brought his Russian Ballet to London. Diaghilev rented a studio on Floral Street opposite the stage door of the Covent Garden Opera House in London at which the Polunins, alongside Pablo Picasso, painted the drop curtains.

From the mid-1920s Elizabeth Polunin focused on portrait and landscape painting. She returned to designing for the theatre in 1933 when she created the sets and costumes for a production of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's The Snow Maiden at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London .

During World War Two she painted commissioned work for the War Artists' Advisory Committee.

She exhibited at the Baillie Gallery, Goupil Gallery, New English Art Club, Royal Academy, Royal Society of British Artists, Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the London Group, Redfern Gallery the Society of Women Artists in London; Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts; the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and at the Paris Salon.

Her address was given as Hammonds Farm, Checkendon, Reading in 1911 and 46 Clarendon Road, Holland Park, London in 1950. She died in Edgware, Middlesex [now London] on 15 June 1950. Her address at the time of her death was 22 Carlisle Road, Kilburn, London.
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[1] Note: her year of birth is sometimes incorrectly given as 1887, the year given in Who's Who in Art, 3rd edition, 1934, however, her birth was officially registered in the second quarter of 1878, her age is given as 2 in the 1881 England and Wales Census, and 32 in the 1911 England and Wales Census.

_{Text source: Art History Research net (AHR net)}