Virtual Presentation: “The Enterprising Eliza Greatorex,” March 25

Thursday, March 27, 6:30 p.m.

Presented by the Figge Artt Museum

Presented on March 25 in conjunction with the Figge Art Museum's current exhibition For America: 200 Years of Painting from the National Academy of Design, the virtual program The Enterprising Eliza Greatorex finds professor and author Katherine Manthorne speaking on the Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle portrait Eliza Greatorex, a famed work painted upon the subject's election to the Academy in 1869.

Between 1854 and 1856, the Irish-born Greatorex studied art with the painters William Wallace Wotherspoon and James and William Hart in New York, and by 1855, she had begun exhibiting sketches. However, it was only after Greatorex was widowed in 1858 that she was able to pursue art full-time, and subsequently supported herself and her children through sales of her art and through teaching for 15 years at a girls' school. Beginning in 1861, she studied with the painter Émile Lambinet outside Paris, and in 1870, she traveled to Germany with her daughters, where they studied at the Pinakothek in Munich. Dissatisfied with commercial reproductions of her work, Gretorex went to Paris in 1879 to study engraving with Charles Henri Toussaint, and from then on, she and her daughters were based out of France.

In 1868, Greatorex was elected an associate of New York's National Academy of Design, becoming the second woman to receive that recognition after Ann Hall, who had died six years earlier. Greatorex was also a member of the Artists' Fund Society of New York, and during the 1870s and '80s, she frequently exhibited her work at the Paris Salon, the National Academy of Design, and at venues in Washington and Boston. In her March 25 presentation for the Figge, Katherine Manthorne will deliver a fascinating lecture that traces the challenges Greatorex faced as a widow with four children and meager financial resources to achieve success in New York's male-dominated art world, and also unravel the meaning of Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle's compelling likeness of this enterprising 50-year old woman dressed in black and holding a pen.

A professor at the Gradual Center of City University of New York, Manthorne previously taught at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where she was chairperson of the department and faculty coordinator of the Getty MESL Project (digital imaging). She was also a Visiting Senior Professor at the University of Delaware, headed the Research Center at Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington D.C., and served as Executive Editor of the journal American Art. Additionally, Manthorne was the recipient of a Senior Research Fulbright Fellowship to Venice, Italy, and has worked on exhibitions and accompanying publications at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, New York's Americas Society, the Smithsonian, and the National Academy of Design.

Manthorne's The Enterprising Eliza Greatorex presentation is free, but advance registration is required, and participants will receive an e-mail with a Zoom link two hours before the program begins at 6:30 p.m. on March 25. For more information on the event, call (563)326-7804 and visit FiggeArtMuseum.org.