A descendent of Abigail and John Adams, Edith Lucile Howard was born in Bellow Falls, Vermont, and attended the Philadelphia School of Design for Women (Moore College of Art) from 1904 to 1908 and won two postgraduate fellowships for European study.  Among her teachers were Elliott Daingerfield and Henry B. Snell. During her lifetime, Howard made over 30 trips abroad where she painted landscapes extensively, and during the 1920s she wintered in Palm Beach, FL.

One of the most significant members of the Philadelphia Ten Women Painters from 1917-45, Howard was also a member of the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors, the Plastic Club of Philadelphia (1910-37), the New York Water Color Club, the Wilmington (DE) Society of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Art Alliance and others. She taught at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, Grand Central Art Galleries (NY) and School of Art in New York and lectured on art and art history over the radio and in person. She exhibited extensively with solo showings in Cleveland, OH, Palm Beach, FL, Providence, RI, Scranton and Southampton, PA, and Washington, DC.

Director of the Wilmington Academy of Art and the Delaware Art Center, Edith Howard was also a member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of women who exhibited together. She studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and with Elliott Daingerfield and Henry Snell. Affiliations included the American Watercolor Society and the National Association of Women Artists. She was also active in New York City where she exhibited at the National Academy of Design and The Whitney Museum, and taught at the Grand Central Galleries and School of Art. She also was active in Washington, DC, where she exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery. In 1938, Howard married prominent Herbert A. Roberts and moved to Moorestown. She exhibited through 1959 and died of cancer the following year.

The Philadelphia Ten: A Women's Artist Group 1917-1945, opened at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art (WMAA) in 1998. A unique and progressive group of women painters and sculptors calling themselves The Philadelphia Ten broke the rules of society and the art world by working and exhibiting together. Their work included both urban and rural landscapes, portraiture, still life, and a variety of representational and myth-inspired sculpture. The exhibition offers the public the opportunity to examine the work of these artists for the first time together in over fifty years, and to consider the role that this group, and women's art groups in general, played in American culture during the first half of this century. Assembled from public and private collections, the exhibition includes 81 paintings and 9 sculptures by the thirty women associated with The Ten, highlighting four women in particular: Isabel Branson Cartwright (1885-1966), Constance Cochrane (1888-1962), Mary Russell Ferrell Colton (1889-1971) and Edith Lucile Howard (1885-1951), who were considered the mainstay of the group. Three of the four, Cartwright, Cochrane, and Howard, participated in all sixty-five exhibitions held over the twenty-eight year span. In addition to this core group, other regular members of The Ten will be featured including: Theresa Bernstein (b. 1886), Cora Smalley Brooks (d. 1930), Fern Isabel Coppedge (1888-1951), Nancy Maybin Ferguson (1872-1967), Sue May Wescott Gill (1887-1989), Helen Kiner McCarthy (1884-1927), Emma Fordyce MacRae (1887-1974), Mary Elizabeth Price (1875-1960), Susan Gertrude Schell (1891 1970), and sculptors Harriet Whitney Frishmuth and Beatrice Fenton.

Source: 1973, J.L. Collins, Women Artists in America; Peter Falk, Who Was Who in American Art; 1985, Dictionary of Women Artists, p. 780;

1990, National Academy of Design Exhibition Records, 1901-1950, p.622; 1998, Page Talbott, The Philadelphia Ten, 917-1945.