![]() ![]() Born to an itinerant preacher and his wife, Greatorex moved fifteen times in the first twenty-two years of her life, presaging the mobility of her later years. The first chapter starts with the artist’s natal family and the journey from Ireland to the United States. This brief section elegantly introduces the themes of change and memory that continue throughout the book as well as Greatorex’s commitment to drawing as an artistic practice. George’s Chapel in 1868 and Greatorex’s documentation of this historic building. The book opens with a prologue narrating the demolition of New York’s St. ![]() She left few documents in her own hand, requiring any account of her life to work from the outside in Manthorne makes a virtue of this necessity, mapping in multiple ways the artist’s life and artistic production. This illuminating text also positions Greatorex within the history of American art, as well as the international art scene created by Americans traveling back and forth to Europe. Manthorne connects Greatorex’s activities as an artist to many other elements of the history of art in nineteenth-century America: notable examples include landscape painting, the etching revival, book illustration, travel literature, and the institutionalization of art in the United States. This becomes quite clear when viewed from the perspective of women artists American society and institutions were in flux, and women quickly stepped into the new niches created by modernization and those vacated by war. The life of this artist, as author Katherine Manthorne posits, shows that the fifteen years between the end of the Civil War and the Centennial constitute a distinct era in American art history. Eventually settling in New York City, she also traveled, with her daughters, to Colorado and to Europe, sometimes staying away from New York for more than a year at a stretch. Greatorex, born in Ireland, was the anchor for a family of artists, especially her sister and her daughters, Kathleen and Eleanor. Composed of a prologue, nine chapters, and an epilogue about the later careers of her daughters, the book, which is the product of twenty years of meticulous research, provides a wealth of detailed information, invaluable for any investigator of women in the visual arts or of the period. ![]() And what a history it is-her career spans the years from the late 1850s to the early 1890s-decades of social, economic, and artistic change. This long-awaited study of artist Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819–1897) effectively interweaves her life narrative and the larger art-historical picture of her times, illuminating that historical context and restoring a once well-known American artist to her place in history. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |