Emma Toll was raised in a Stockholm military and craft family, her maternal grandfather Carl Gustaf Svensson was part of the Stockholm bourgeoisie's military corps before it was disbanded in 1870, he was also the tailor who bought and then built property on Hantverkargatan on Kungsholmen, opposite the present Landstingshuset. She studied at the Swedish School of Craft. She was a very promising student there which established when she becomes one of the very few admitted to the first class of only female students at the Academy of Arts in the autumn of 1864.

Emma Toll attended both schools in parallel until 1871 when she switched to teaching at Kungsholm's elementary school for girls founded in the 1860s by Hilda Widell. When Grandpa passes away, the family bets on Emma Toll so that she can educate herself in Paris. In 1878 she starts at Academie Julian and is one of the Swedish female pupils mentioned in classmate Marie Bashkirtseff's famous diary from that year. She writes: “Emma is very good, but does not work enough and has crazy ideas”. Emma Toll was one of the classically schooled academy students who probably worked very hard, but she may have had a little rebellious side, which during her lifetime was more permissible for the male avant-garde.

Even during her academic days, she showed self-interest when she hooked up with Georg von Rosen during his fellowship in Rome and they walked around the city with Emma masquerading as a male friend, someone who was revealed at the Scandinavian Association where only men had access, it was sold it became a documented debacle remembered in Nordic cultural circles. In Paris, she was one of the few from Sweden, earlier than Prince Eugen, who joined Henri Gervex as a pupil of Henri Gervex, an accomplished portraitist with much commission but who in 1878 made a scandal with the painting Rolla.

Emma Toll was probably not afraid of controversy, she was a skilled copyist and painted two copies of Julius Kronoberg's painting Jaktnymf and Fauner. One of these copies was sold in the United States at auction in 1995 with an asking price of 5000-7000 US dollars. Prices for Emma Toll at Swedish auctions have varied considerably. In recent years, some have gone in the lower price ranges that accrue to forgotten female artists but sometimes they are valued higher. The painting “The Artist at the Easel” dated to the year 1890 was sold in 1998 at auction for over 12000 euros.