Eliza Bolling was the daugher of the Rev. Dr. Jesse S. and Martha (née Trueheart) Armistead. Her father was a well known minister of the Presbyterian Church who lived for many years before the Civil War at "Woodville" in the Guinea neighborhood of Cumberland County, Virginia. Eliza married Archibald Bolling of Richmond, Virginia. She inherited from her mother two c. 1800 paintings of fox hunting scenes commissioned by Eliza's grandfather, Bartholomew Trueheart [1770-1834] of Selma, in Powhatan County, Virginia. The pictures (now in the NGA) were painted by an unknown itinerant artist, and are said to depict Bartholomew Trueheart as the central figure on horseback, in the environs of the Selma estate. Eliza's son Wyndham Bolling inherited the pictures, which descended in the family until their final sale in 1948.