Restless Enterprise

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