Restless Enterprise: The Life and Art of Eliza Pratt Greatorex. Katherine Manthorne. University of California Press. 2020.
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Consulting primary documents, press clippings and public sources, together with travel and fieldwork, Katherine Manthorne has assembled the first biography of this remarkable Irish-American feminist artist. Once ranked among the greatest America women in history, Greatorex is all but forgotten today. Manthorne’s book will be published later this year by University of California Press.
Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897) was raised in County Donegal, Ireland, the daughter of a Methodist circuit preacher. She moved to New York, to become a leader in the American women’s movement. Described in the press as the ‘first artist of her sex’, Eliza documented the demolition of old New York, to make way for a new city rising from the rubble. As a cultural leader, she organized the New York women artists exhibiting in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. A powerhouse of art-making, Greatorex and her two daughters traveled to Munich, Paris, Britain, Ireland, Morocco and Colorado. Despite Gilded-Age repression, Eliza soldiered on as a leader in the plein-air etching movement. The restless, peripatetic Eliza finally retired to Moret-sur-Loin near Fonatinebleau. Active until her death in Paris in 1897, Eliza remained a celebrity twenty years after the pinnacle of her career. Today her name has been but forgotten, until now. A remarkable Irishwoman is about to step out of the shadows, to share a yet untold story about women, art and enterprise in 19th-century America.
Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897).”Joseph Chaudlait House on Bloomingdale Road”, Oil on canvas: 17 x 33 in. Collection Ronald & Carole Berg.
