Eleanor Norcross

'Eleanor Norcross' (1854-1925) was a talented impressionist artist, art collector and social reformer. She was an well-known figure in the Woman’s Liberation movement in America, leading social movements for public education, and helping to found the Pre-Columbian art collection at the Fitchburg Art Museum. She was known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner of her central Massachusetts region because she donated all her paintings and art collection to create the Fitchburg Art Museum.

    She was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, a growing prosperous mill town about 50 miles west of Boston and was the daughter of Augusta and Amasa Norcross, her father eventually becoming the mayor of Fitchburg.  She attended Wheaton Seminary (now Wheaton College), where she distinguished herself as an outstanding scholar, leader and personality of unusual grace and charm.  While at Wheaton, she wrote many esssays fo tthe still-thriving literary journal "Rushlight.  Most revealing in terms of her femisnist orientation is an essay composed on the eve of her graduation: 

    "How we have longed for that day...But now perhaps because 'twas only distance that lent enchantment,    perhaps because our senior year has done more for us than we realized, we cannot bear to think what it will be like to have no definite object in our daily lives...and so when we think of the universities waiting to receive the graduates of Exeter and Phillips '72, we are deeply tempted to the unmaidenly sin of envy and are deeply interested in that much discussed question "Why shall not women be admitted to our colleges?"  Who can say how many mute and inglorious Minervas are doing tatting and crochet work because they haven't the privilege of the best education their circumstances can afford."  

  Eleanor embarked upon the study of art following her graduation from Wheaton.  She commuted daily by train from Fitchburg to Boston- no easy trip in those days - in order to attend the Massachusetts Normal School (Now the Massachusetts College of Art) where she earned a certificate in 1876.   

   Eleanor lived in Paris from 1880 to 1920, studying with Alfred Steven and often exhibiting. In America, she exhibited as part of Women's Art at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago 1893, along with other prominent woman painters including Mary Cassat and Josephine Granger Cochrane (1864-1953).<ref>http://members.cox.net/academia2/cassatt6d.html<ref>
   The

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1893 Exposition was for woman painters from all over the world and was the first opportunity they had ever been given to exhibit in large numbers to large American and international audiences.  Thus, the 1893 Exposition forms a valuable record of what women artists in the late-nineteenth century were accomplishing despite an art world that rarely accepted women artists as equals and had often refused to give them the same art training and support considered essential to the development of male artists and their careers.  

 After thirty years in Paris, she retired to Fitchburg where continued to paint and promoted art by donating her art collection to found 

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the Fitchburg Museum.

References

<<ref>Murray, Ann H., Eleanor Norcross: Artist, Collector and Social Reformer, Womens Art Journal, Autumn, 1981 - Winter, 1982.<ref> <ref>http://members.cox.net/academia2/cassatt6h.html<ref> <ref>http://members.cox.net/academia2/cassatt6d.html<ref>

External links

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