Katherine Manthorne Bücher

Focusing on the contributions of American women photographers in a time when female employment was rare, this study highlights their significant yet often overlooked roles in shaping photography. It examines two generations of photographers across diverse locations, using primary sources to delve into their individual careers, studio operations, and artistic outputs. The book features a variety of photographic forms and subjects, linking the evolution of photography with the women's movement of the late 19th century, thereby enriching the narratives of photographic, American, and women's history.

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.

Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) painted pictures that critics praised for their ability to exude the fragrance of field flowers and glow with the plumage of birds. Raised in Salem and long residing in Connecticut, she maintained a studio in New York City, where she exhibited her art for over forty years at the National Academy, American Watercolor Society and other prestigious venues. Transforming flower painting from a domestic outlet for female amateurs to a marketable commodity for professionals, she never waived in her conviction that women had the right to shape independent careers on their own terms. Often, she combined plants with local birds to convey a sophisticated understanding of their environmental interaction that encouraged others to appreciate and conserve nature. Assembling a cross-section of her oil paintings, watercolours, chromolithographs and illustrated volumes for the first time, and analysing them against letters, diaries and periodical reviews, Fidelia Bridges combines a recovery of the artist' s biography with close readings of her artworks.

Takes the reader on their own journey through awe-inspiring mountain scenery painted by international artists of the mid-nineteenth century.