Womens History Month

Susie Barstow
(1828—1901)

Most of the female members of the Hudson River School were related in some way to the male painters, as their wives, sisters, daughters or nieces. The 2010 exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York, which was curated by Jennifer Krieger and Nancy Siegel, was the first to focus on the fact that the Hudson River School also included a number of female painters who developed an independent approach to American landscape: artists such as Susie M. Barstow, Edith Wilkinson Cook, Julie Hart Beers, Evelina Mount, Eliza Greatorex, Harriet Cany Peale, Josephine Walters and Sarah Cole. Their existence and creative output had previously been ignored or simply dismissed – perhaps on the assumption that plein-air painting in the American wilderness would have been too difficult for women and they could therefore not have produced anything of artistic merit. It was claimed that women did not even know “how to stick an umbrella spike into the ground.”

Barstow’s father was a tea merchant in Brooklyn, New York, where she was also raised. She trained as an artist at the Rutgers Female Institute in New York and also in Europe. She never married, and died at the age of 87. In a brief obituary in the New York Times of 13 June 1923 she is described as a painter and art teacher, and reference is also made to the fact that she exhibited over 75 paintings at the Brooklyn Art Association, the National Academy of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

With her friend Edith Wilkinson Cook, Barstow would sketch and paint on hiking expeditions along the Hudson River and in the surrounding Catskill, Adirondack and White Mountains. The two women were members of the Appalachian Mountain Club but also climbed in the Alps and the Black Forest, where they reported hiked up to 25 miles a day. Clothing restrictions were a particular problem for women artists who wanted to work outdoors at that time; the dress code for women included floor-length, voluminous hooped skirts (usually made of easily flammable fabrics), tight bodices and dainty shoes with heels. Defying all conventions, Barstow solved this problem by shortening her skirts to above the ankles, replacing her petticoats with trousers and wearing firmly tied boots. She also attached rings to her waistcoat that she could attach her skirts to, giving her greater freedom of movement while climbing.

She could accordingly be considered a precursor of today’s ‘walking artists’ such as Hamish Fulton or Richard Long. The influence of one of the older members of the Hudson River School, Asher Brown Durand, can be felt to some extent in Barstow’s landscapes, which are imbued with a stillness that is almost spiritual. Her depictions of bodies of water with deserted banks convey a sense of solitude that she herself must have experienced. Her well-balanced, light-infused compositions follow all the rules of American romantic landscape painting. These and the other works shown in the group exhibition clearly demonstrated that the ‘ladies’ are just as much a part of the Hudson River School movement as their male counterparts, and it is the fault of art historiography that their achievements were not properly acknowledged until 2010.

Eliza Pratt Greatorex
(1819—1897)

Eliza Pratt Greatorex was an Irish-born American artist who was affiliated with the Hudson River School. She is known for her landscape paintings as well as for several series of pen-and-ink drawings and etchings that were published in book form. She was the second woman to be elected an associate of the National Academy of Design, following Ann Hall.

Greatorex first became known as a landscape painter of the Hudson River School.[2] She often worked en plein air, and her landscapes reflect her careful observation of her environment.[8] Her best-known paintings are View on the Houstonic (1863), The Forge (1864), and Somerindyke House (1869).[2] One series of paintings was executed on panels taken from specific churches; these include Bloomingdale Church and The North Dutch Church (painted on panels taken from the North Dutch Church on Fulton Street in New York City) and St. Paul's Church, painted on a panel taken from that church.[9]

After a few years, Greatorex's artistic practice migrated from painting to pen-and-ink sketches, which she elaborated as etchings. Experimenting with new printing methods, Greatorex published many of her images in book form.[10] Many of her sketches consist of architectural subjects, often framed by foliage, and drawings of landscapes produced during several trips to Europe in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1870–1872, she visited Nuremberg and Ober-Ammergau, Germany; Munich, Austria; and various parts of Italy. The Nuremberg and Ober-Ammergau trips led to the publication of Etchings in Nuremberg (1873) and The Homes of Ober-Ammergau (1873).[2] Her large pen-and-ink drawing of Albrecht Dürer's house in Nuremberg is now in the Vatican in Rome.[6]
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REFERENCES:
Grand Women Artists of the Hudson River School, Smithsonian Magazine. Remember the Ladies, Women of the Hudson River School, Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Hudson NY