In Memoriam

Elizabeth E. Roth, longtime Keeper of Prints at The New York Public Library, passed away in Zürich on February 17, 2023, in the 104th year of her life. Born and raised in Switzerland, Betty, as she was fondly known, immigrated to the United States in May 1939. She attended the University of Minnesota’s School of Library Science, graduating from the program with honors. Betty quickly received several job offers, including one in Washington, DC. Determined to live in New York, however, she accepted a role at The New York Public Library, initially in the Central Children’s Room, then located in the main research library at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. A few years later, Karl Kup (who served for more than three decades as curator of the Spencer Collection, keeper of prints, and head of the Art and Architecture Division), knowing that she was fluent in several languages and well versed in the history of art, invited her to be his assistant. When Kup retired in 1968, Betty replaced him as Keeper of Prints and Curator of the Spencer Collection. She attended her first meeting of Print Council in 1972.

Betty especially loved old master and Swiss prints, and made many important additions to the collection, among them ornament prints, purchasing such works as Jean Laurent Legeay’s Fountains and Tombs, Agostino Mitelli’s Masks and Hats, and Anne Allen’s Nouvelle Suite de Cahiers de Desseins Chinois. She also arranged significant gifts, including a collection of 650 prints and drawings by Reginald Marsh and 130 prints by Gustave Baumann. During her time as keeper of the Print Room, Betty also established firm friendships with living artists, including Sue Fuller, who gave a collection of her prints to the Library in 1972. She mounted several exhibitions, too, including Picasso and His Contemporaries (1963), Aspects of Urban Life (1968), The Reflected Image: The Mirror in Art (1970), and Printmaking in America (1976). The book Music in Prints (1965), which she wrote with Sydney Beck, was the subject of an exhibition of the same name in 1967.

After her retirement in 1981, Betty divided her time between Zürich and New York. During this period, Janet Byrne of the Metropolitan Museum of Art invited her to pursue her research on festival books, which form an important component of the Spencer Collection. In the Met’s Print Room and Thomas J. Watson Library, Betty assembled an annotated bibliography of the subject, drawing on her insights about the Spencer Collection and adding information about other works in significant American and European collections. She ultimately donated the papers, together with several pamphlets from the Fête des Vignerons, a wine festival in Vevey, Switzerland—which she attended several times—to the Getty Research Center. 

In 1992, a landscape fund was established in Betty’s honor by Mary W. Covington, and many important works have since been added to the Library’s print collection as a result of it, including Caspar David Friedrich’s Scene of a Fire, Arthur Wesley Dow’s The Old Bridge or Ipswich Bridge, Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s Haiga Portfolio, and Etel Adnan’s Le soleil a vécu, among many others. An exhibition held in the Library’s Print and Stokes Galleries in 2002–03 titled A Legacy in Landscapes celebrated the gift and featured a selection of major acquisitions from the fund.

Visitors to the Library recall Betty’s deep familiarity with the collection and her readiness to share her knowledge, as well as her personal sense of propriety. Ruth Fine, who frequented the Library’s Print Study Room during Betty’s time, recalls that: “If I was in New York for gallery- or museum-going, and was not ‘professionally’ dressed—that is, wearing blue jeans, as we called them then—I would not go into ‘Elizabeth Roth’s Print Room’ as a last-minute decision, as it would have been showing a lack of respect for her institutional formality.” Betty often assisted with tricky research questions relating to all aspects of the department’s holdings. One reader, according to the oral history Betty recorded with Dick Field, was so delighted with the help she provided that he remarked: “Oh, I’m so sorry I am already married. I would have married you . . . .”