{"id":427,"date":"2022-12-31T19:42:28","date_gmt":"2022-12-31T19:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/?p=427"},"modified":"2022-12-31T20:05:19","modified_gmt":"2022-12-31T20:05:19","slug":"birthday-blog-eliza-pratt-greatorex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/2022\/12\/31\/birthday-blog-eliza-pratt-greatorex\/","title":{"rendered":"BIRTHDAY BLOG: Eliza Pratt Greatorex"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katherine Manthorne (c) 2022
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\u00a0<\/strong>Telling the Lives of Visual Artists: A Female Artist in the Pioneer West<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Fig. 1. Cover, Restless Enterprise: The Art & Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Artists don\u2019t make it easy for their biographers. The intensely-private Winslow Homer is one example of the reluctant painter who \u2013 when he sensed a journalist was pursuing him \u2013 sequestered himself inside his studio and placed a sign on the door that read \u201cWinslow Homer is not at home.\u201d He insisted, like many, that his art should speak for itself, while the details of his daily existence were irrelevant. How then does the passionate biographer gather research and narrate the life of the individual who created a complex body of work at a particular historic moment?\u00a0 With persistence, material can be gathered and books completed, but then what? Books focusing on the careers of writers \u2013 novelists, poets and essayists \u2013 are eagerly consumed by the American readers, who can conveniently find them under the heading of \u201cLiterary Biography.\u201d Conversely, there is no comparable rubric for the life stories of those who create images. Does this mean that the public doesn\u2019t really care about the visual arts, or is it that their lives just don\u2019t translate into exciting tales? How can writers make their lives more relevant and accessible?<\/p>\n

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Fig. 2. Title Page, Eliza Greatorex, Summer Etchings in Colorado (NY: GP Putnams, 1873).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Fig. 3 Eliza Greatorex, The homes of Ober-Ammergau. A series of twenty etchings in heliotype, from the original pen-and-ink drawings, together with notes from a diary kept during a three months’ residence in Ober-Ammergau, in the summer of 1871. Munich: Joseph Albert.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These are the questions I struggled with as I pondered Homer\u2019s contemporary Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819-1897), the most prominent female artist in post-Civil War New York.\u00a0 Slowly accumulating the details of her life, I became hooked on her personal and professional story and in December 2020 \u2013 at the height of the pandemic \u2013 the University of California Press published my monograph entitled Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex <\/em>(fig. 1).\u00a0 <\/em>The book follows her successive reinventions as as landscape painter, urban graphic artist and plein-air etcher while tracing her political advocacy for Women\u2019s Rights, architectural preservation and the place of the Irish in America.\u00a0 A widow with four children and limited finances, she charted her path to success in the male art establishment to become the hero of her own life\u2019s journey. Here journey is the operative word, for her\u2019s was a peripatetic life that is perhaps best told as a travelogue. Bearing in mind that it was taboo in her day for a woman to travel without a male escort, I want to share one of her many adventures as we celebrate her birthday December 25, 1819.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 4 Eliza Greatorex, Col. Kittredge\u2019s Ranch; Our Camp by Pass Creek, from Summer Etchings in Colorado<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Fig. 5 James Thurlow, Ute Chiefs: Warrency, Chavano, Ancatosh, Ouray, Guerro,c.1875, albumen print stereograph, Private Collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cMrs. Greatorex, an artist of considerable note in the east \u2026 is en route to Colorado on a sketching tour\u201d a Denver newspaper announced in July 1873. She intended \u201cto procure illustrations for a work on this territory\u201d which she published that December as a book Summer Etchings in Colorado<\/em>, just in time for the Christmas market (fig. 2). Four years earlier the Transcontinental Railroad began conveying travelers across the US in less than a week, a vast improvement over the months of bouncing along in a saddle or the backbreaking stagecoach seats in former times.\u00a0 Always in search of new material for her art, Greatorex had begun planning a trip to the Rocky Mountains during her 1870-72 sojourn in Bavaria (fig. 3). \u00a0She also thought that outdoor life (fig. 4) would be a good experience for her two daughters — Kathleen, age 23, and Eleanor, age 19 \u2013 both artists-in-training. So the trio headed west by train from New York to Denver, then south, to arrive at the newly founded Colorado Springs, where they encountered Chavano and other Ute Indians (fig. 5). From there they made the arduous climb up Cheyenne Ca\u00f1on, celebrating their achievement by making an on-the-spot drawing and inserting the three female figures on the ledge just below the falls (fig. 6).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 6 Eliza Greatorex, Looking out, Cheyenne Canyon, from Summer Etchings in Colorado<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Fig. 7 Eliza Greatorex, The Garden of the Gods, from St. Nicholas Magazine 2 (Dec. 1874): 64-69.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

They explored the Garden of the Gods, where she rendered the fantastic rock formations (fig. 7). And they survived the perils of an ascent up Mount Lincoln and then a descent into Montezuma mine, considered the highest in North America (fig. 8).\u00a0 \u201cFrom Pueblo to the coal mines is the wildest bit of country I had yet seen,\u201d she wrote in her book. \u201cWe enter the mines. By the twinkling lamps carried in the miners\u2019 hats we see & wonder at the dark processes of mining\u2026. Later we turn away from those living tombs\u2026 and the hard lives passed in the Pueblo Coal Mines.\u201d Her pictures convey the Rockies from a woman\u2019s perspective while her Colorado story possesses all the elements we identify as characteristic of western sagas: enterprise, talent, hope, tragedy, and sheer love of adventure. Telling the life of this pioneering female visual artist was itself an adventure.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 8 Eliza Greatorex, Montezuma Mine, from Summer Etchings in Colorado<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

Happy Birthday, Eliza Greatorex!!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Katherine Manthorne (c) 2022 \u00a0Telling the Lives of Visual Artists: A Female Artist in the Pioneer West Artists don\u2019t make it easy for their biographers. The intensely-private Winslow Homer is one example of the reluctant painter who \u2013 when he sensed a journalist was pursuing him \u2013 sequestered himself inside his studio and placed a … Continue reading BIRTHDAY BLOG: Eliza Pratt Greatorex<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":455,"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions\/455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katherinemanthorne.com\/historian_art_women\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}