Lydia Emmet came from a family of politicians and artists. Her maternal great- grandfather, Thomas Addis Emmet, an Irish patriot who participated in the uprising of 1798, immigrated to America in 1804. He was appointed New York governor De Witt Clinton's attorney general in 1812 and was a prominent member of the state bar. Her father, William Jenkins Emmet, served in the New York state legislature in 1828 and later was appointed a superior court judge. The family genealogy is somewhat confusing as the Emmet and Le Roy families intermarried. The women in the family were artistic. Elizabeth Emmet Le Roy, Lydia's maternal grandmother, was a portraitist, and her mother, Julia Colt Pierson, studied with Daniel Huntington. Lydia's older sister Rosina and their cousin Ellen Emmet also pursued artistic careers.
In 1880, while still in private school, Emmet began selling illustrations; she continued doing so intermittently until the 1890s. Her formal art education began in 1884, when she and Rosina went to Paris and entered the women's class at the Académie Julian, studying under William Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury and then independently under Frederick MacMonnies.
Upon her return to New York in 1885, Emmet continued resumed work in commercial design and illustration. From 1889 to 1895, she was enrolled in the Art Students League, receiving instruction from William Merritt Chase, Kenyon Cox, H. Siddons Mowbray, and Robert Reid. Chase proved to be her most influential mentor. When he established the Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island in 1891, Emmet was appointed instructor of his preparatory class, a position she also held the next two summers.
In 1893 Emmet executed a mural, Art, Science and Literature, for the Woman's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and, in 1899, designed stained glass for Tiffany and Company. However, in the early 1890s she had begun concentrating on portraiture, and it was in that area that Emmet established a highly successful career. Initially, she produced miniatures as well as full-scale portraits, but gave up painting miniatures after about 1904. Her sitters were men and women prominent in business, education, and society. Perhaps her most celebrated subject was Mrs. Herbert Hoover, whose official White House portrait she executed. It was for her large-scale, comparatively formal portraits of children, however, that she was best known.
By 1905 she had begun building a summer studio and residence, Strawberry Hill, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but she maintained a home and studio in New York throughout her adulthood. During World War I, she worked with the Duryea War Relief organization in France. A regular participant in major competitive exhibitions, she won many prizes. The Academy awarded her the Thomas R. Proctor Prize in the 1907 winter exhibition and the Thomas B. Clarke and Isaac N. Maynard prizes in the annual exhibitions of 1909 and 1918, respectively.
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