Prominent civic leader and philanthropist known as the “first lady” of Connecticut and one of the first women patrons of American art.

Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, the first child of Elizabeth Miller Hart and the Episcopal minister William Jarvis, married the world famous arms manufacturer Samuel Colt in 1856. By this marriage, Colt gained access to the restricted social circles of nineteenth century Connecticut.

With Colt's premature death at the age of 47, Elizabeth became one of the richest women in the US, inheriting several million dollars and a controlling interest in Colt's Patent Arms Manufacturing Company stock. Elizabeth Colt used her position and wealth to play a leading role in countless Connecticut religious, social, art, and charitable organizations. She helped found and presided over the Union for Home Work, the Hartford Decorative Arts Society, the Connecticut Society of the Colonial Dames of America, the Women's Auxiliary to the Board of Missions of the Episcopal Church, and Hartford's Soldiers' Aid Society for which she staged many fund-raising theatrical performances. Elizabeth also maintained tight control over the Colt factory for most of the forty-three years she outlived her husband.

In 1865 Elizabeth Colt began work on a formal art gallery to be established on the second floor of Armswear, the elaborate Italianate villa the couple had built on Wethersfield Avenue, south of the Atheneum. With the help of the artist Frederic Church, she began to collect paintings and sculpture and to commission landscape works by other well-known New York artists, including Thomas Cole, John Kensett, James Hamilton, William Beard, and William Bradford, as well as Charles Loring Elliott, who painted monumental portraits of Samuel Colt and of Elizabeth with her only surviving child, her son Caldwell.

By the time of her death, the Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt Collection, had grown to over 600 individual American and European objets d'art. Colt bequeathed the collection to the Wadsworth Atheneum and endowed a building for it. Today it is valued as a rare example of an intact private collection reflecting the artistic taste of the Victorian era, and Elizabeth Colt is herself remembered as an important patron of nineteenth century American art.