Ida Gertrude Eise was trained at Elam School of Art from 1905 to 1915. From 1916 to 1919, she taught art at New Plymouth Technical College. She worked at Elam from 1920 to 1956, and again, briefly, from 1959 to 1960. She spent the following year in Europe with her friend Lois White, who had been her student and later a colleague at Elam. From 1961 to 1962 she toured the South Pacific, Australia, and Europe.

At Elam Eise was in charge of teaching still life. She believed still life was the basis of all art, that it gave artists the discipline to branch out into their own style. Her passion for translating the natural world into play with form and colour is evident in the still-life flower paintings she produced throughout her career. Her sketchbooks contain botanical drawings of native species, which contrast markedly in style with her flower paintings.

Eise was consistently well reviewed in the 1930s. She was a member in the late 1940s of the New Group, which aimed 'to emphasise the substance of things rather than the emotions evoked by them'. Its members included Lois White, Frances Wright, James Turkington and Pauline Blomfield. Eise largely continued the approach taught to her by Friström; a loose square-brush style with an emphasis on formal concerns within a realist framework. By the 1950s the milieu in which she painted had changed, though her subject matter had not. Ida Eise was made an MBE in 1976.