The son of painter Edward D. B. Betts, Louis Betts spent his boyhood in Chicago where he studied the violin and painting. His works from these early years are landscapes. He entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1894, studying under William Merritt Chase. Betts won the Pennsylvania Academy's Cresson traveling scholarship in 1903, enabling him to visit The Netherlands, and Spain, where at Chase's suggestion, he concentrated on the work of Hals and Velasquez, thus commencing his interest in portraiture. It was also Chase, perhaps, who arranged for introductions to several aristocratic Europeans, which resulted in Betts's first portrait commissions.
From 1906 to 1910, the artist was again in Chicago, however for the remainder of his life, he lived in New York, summering in Shelbourne Falls, Massachusetts. He early attained prominence as a society portraitist but also produced imaginative figural subjects. Among his many portrait sitters were the popular author Booth Tarkington, art critic Royal Cortissoz, and William O. Goodman, founder of the Goodman Theater, Chicago.
Betts married Giovanna M. Kerzenknabe in 1899; two years following her death in 1935, he married Zara Trevorrow Symons, the widow of George Gardner Symons.
Betts began exhibiting in Academy annuals in 1902, and was a regular contributors to Academy exhibitions throughout his life, receiving the Proctor and Altman prizes in the winter exhibitions of 1918 and 1923, respectively, the Saltus Medal in 1931, Obrig prize in 1933, Maynard prize in 1937, and Isidor medal in 1941. He twice was elected to three-year terms on the Council, serving 1919-22 and 1930-33.
