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"A work of exceptional scholarship and dynamic storytelling, Restless Enterprise offers the first comprehensive biography and critical assessment of the long-overlooked American artist Eliza Pratt Greatorex. Decades of original research have come to exquisite fruition in this captivating account of Irish roots, nineteenth-century art, women’s rights, and westward expansion. Katherine Manthorne has illuminated a new star in American cultural history."—Adrienne Baxter Bell, author of George Inness and the Visionary Landscape
"Manthorne’s sweeping cultural biography of Greatorex represents the first contemporary study to situate this largely forgotten figure in her expansive moment. A compelling story that deepens our knowledge of the pre–Civil War New York art world and women’s positions within it, Restless Enterprise enriches the fields of visual and cultural studies."—Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge of the American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art
"This important, magisterial book belongs in the library of anyone interested in nineteenth-century art and culture. With sweeping context and captivating detail, Manthorne reveals how a widowed artist with four children maneuvered in the Manhattan art world, survived tragedies, and gorgeously documented scenery from the Rockies to Algiers."—Eve M. Kahn, author of Forever Seeing New Beauties: The Forgotten Impressionist Mary Rogers Williams, 1857–1907
"Eliza Greatorex finally gets the attention she deserves in this masterful narrative. Manthorne deftly interweaves history, biography, and art into a vivid evocation of New York City and the nation at a moment of massive transformation, placing a pioneering artist within a network of American women who forged a new moment of professional and personal independence."—Sarah Henry, Robert A. and Elizabeth Rohn Jeffe Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Museum of the City of New York
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prologue: The Old Church
1. Maeve’s Daughters: From Ireland to America, 1819–1848
2. Art, Domesticity, and Enterprise, 1850–1861
3. Civil War and Architectural Destruction
4. Success in the New York Art World, 1865–1870
5. In the Footsteps of Dürer, 1870–1872
6. Taming the West: Summer Etchings in Colorado (1873)
7. Old New York (1875): Witnessing Urban Transformation
8. Centennial Women, 1876–1878
9. Transatlantique: From New York City to Paris, from Cragsmoor to Morocco, 1878–1897
Epilogue: Kathleen and Eleanor Greatorex Carrying On Alone
Notes
Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
About the author
Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. An award-winning art historian, she is the author of monographs on Martha Mitchell, Frederic Church, Louis Mignot, and James Suydam.
Summary
Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819–1897) was America’s most famous woman artist in the mid-nineteenth century, but today she is all but forgotten. Beginning with her Irish roots, this biography brings her art and life back into focus. Breaking conventions for female artists at that time, Greatorex specialized in landscapes and streetscapes, traveling from the Hudson River to the Colorado Rockies and across Europe and North Africa. Her crowning achievement, a monumental tome of drawings and narratives titled Old New York, awakened the public to the destruction of the city’s architectural heritage during the post–Civil War era. Exploring Greatorex’s fierce ambition and creative path, Katherine Manthorne reveals how her success at forging an independent career in a male-dominated world shaped American gender politics, visual culture, and urban consciousness.
Additional text
"Manthorne’s prose is quite lyrical at times, and her visual analysis of Greatorex’s compositions provide a fluid and balanced assessment of her work."
