Patience Lovell was born in 1725 at Oyster Bay on Long Island into a prosperous Quaker farming family. When she was about four, the Lovells moved to Bordentown, New Jersey. Accounts of the household describe religious practices that were unusual even among neighboring colonists: the family followed a vegetarian diet, and Patience and her sisters wore white clothing associated with purity. Quaker culture emphasized spiritual equality, plainness, literacy, disciplined work, and suspicion of empty social rank. Patience nevertheless developed an expressive, forceful personality that contemporaries later found strikingly unconventional.

As a girl, she learned the household and agricultural skills expected in a farming family and was taught to read and write. She and her sister Rachel also amused themselves by shaping small figures and faces from bread dough, putty, claylike substances, or wax. These experiments were not initially treated as professional artistic training. Colonial America offered women almost no formal path into sculpture, and wax modeling was more commonly associated with craft, domestic amusement, anatomical demonstration, or popular display than with elite fine art.

Patience left the family home while young and moved to Philadelphia. In 1748 she married Joseph Wright, a Quaker barrelmaker or barrel-marker considerably older than she was. She managed the household and raised children while continuing to model faces for amusement. Her close observation of expression and her practice with soft materials gradually produced a distinctive ability to create convincing likenesses without the academic training available to male European artists.

The decisive break in her life came in 1769, when Joseph Wright died. Patience was left responsible for supporting a family, reportedly while pregnant with another child. She joined forces with her widowed sister Rachel Wells and transformed an informal talent into paid work, producing wax portraits for customers in the middle colonies. Her widowhood thus ended her long domestic apprenticeship. Economic necessity, manual confidence, theatrical personality, and years of self-directed practice combined to launch the professional career that eventually took her to London and made her the best-known American wax sculptor of her generation.