Design and Art Australia Online

painter, was the eldest daughter of John Millar Ritchie and Frances Anne (Fanny), née Chrisp, of Blythevale, Streatham, Victoria, a pioneering Western District family. During her early childhood the family spent some years in Europe (a younger sister, Florence, was born in Paris in 1861). Eleanor was always keen on drawing and attended Melbourne’s National Gallery School for about six months under Eugene von Guérard, mainly copying paintings – uninspiringly, by her own later account. She decided on a career as an artist while revisiting Europe with her family in 1876.After nine months at the South Kensington Schools in 1878 Eleanor Ritchie enrolled at Heatherley’s. With her sisters – Florence Elizabeth (d.1879), Agnes Margaret (b.1863) and Lilias Linton (1855-1929), all painters – she visited Paris and the plein-air artists’ colony at Pont Aven in Brittany. Then, while sketching in the countryside near Paris, she met the American plein-airist (Lowell) Birge Harrison. They were married not long afterwards.Birge Harrison had been ill with malaria and in 1883 he and Eleanor set out for New Mexico, apparently with the intention of settling in Santa Fe. The expedition became a nine-month tour of New Mexico, Colorado and the Rio Grande, camping out for weeks in the Rocky Mountains 'among the cowboys, the Mexicans, and the Indians’. Next the young couple travelled northwards, Harrison bringing home his bride and, more urgently, seeking further medical treatment in New Plymouth. By March 1885 they were living in Philadelphia, his birthplace, at 108 Queen Street, Germantown, but decided to return to Europe later that year.Birge Harrison’s doctors must have done a good job, for he and Eleanor now travelled to Holland ('wandering through the famous Frans Hals Gallery was like being welcomed home after a long absence’, she wrote) and Italy; then back to Paris; visited his brother, Alexander, at Concarneau on the Brittany coast and stayed for a time at Etaples in Normandy. Then they were on the road again: to Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy and Corsica. They evidently spent some months in Provence before embarking on a donkey-riding tour of the Rhone valley. Somewhere between whistle-stops, Eleanor continued her art studies in Paris under Benjamin Constant and Jules Lefebvre. In 1886 she had a painting accepted by the Paris Salon ( La Mère Honoré ).In 1887 the Harrisons settled for eighteen months in Etaples. They rented a house, built an 'enormous studio’ in the garden, and Eleanor unpacked her Australian books and decorated the rooms with gumleaves. She presumably accompanied her husband to Paris to visit the great Exposition Universelle of 1889 where he was awarded a silver medal; in December they arrived at Melbourne aboard the Valetta . Delighted by the sunshine and fresh air and planning to stay at least two years, they joined the Victorian Artists’ Society, took a studio in New Zealand Chambers, Collins Street and a house at Sandringham. By 1891 they were preparing for yet another move. On 20 May they held an exhibition at Gemmell, Tuckett & Co.'s rooms and two days later an auction sale of about forty works. Soon afterwards, they departed for California. On 27 April 1895, their son Linton Robert was born and died. Eleanor died less than a week later, on 1 May 1895. The place of her death is given variously as Santa Barbara or, less likely, Colorado Plains.Eleanor Ritchie Harrison is a classic example of the 'forgotten’ Australian woman artist. She was professionally trained in Melbourne, London and Paris and her paintings were hung on the line at the Paris Salon and highly praised in Melbourne in the 1880s and ’90s. Yet where are they now? Where is her Home of the Gippsland Pioneer of 1891, showing 'an interior of a bush home’ and praised by Table Talk as one of her most striking efforts? Or The Selector’s Family , or her copies after Velasquez and Antoine Vollon (1833-1900) and the numerous French subjects she sent home from Paris or brought back with her to Australia? She sent two French subjects home for exhibition at the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1882 and three more followed in March 1883. She sent Etaples subjects, not only to the Paris Salons of 1887 and 1888, but also to the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS).The Poacher’s Daughter ( La Fille de Braconnier ) was one of the paintings sent out by the artist for the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition of 1888-89; it was shown in the Ladies’ Court of the Victorian Artists’ Gallery along with her An Interior, Brittany and A Breton Peasant . The Fine Arts jury awarded her a second order of merit (along with Tom Roberts and Alice Chapman) for the last- Ellis Rowan was the only Victorian artist to receive a first-while both other works won a third order of merit. The painting was shown again in a private view to mark the opening of her new Melbourne studio in April 1890 and at Gemmell Tuckett’s in May 1891. Recently rediscovered by a private collector in Adelaide, it was by then truly a 'forgotten painting’. Battered and grubby, somewhat repaired and overpainted, it had lost its frame-but not the original label with its title on the back of the stretcher: ’17./the poachers daughter’. Presumably it was sold in the Harrisons’ auction just before they left Australia in 1891. Then the artist’s identity was soon forgotten. Even though the work is clearly signed and dated, it seems that Eleanor Harrison was not even a memory in Australia-and she was never heard of as an artist in America, despite her husband’s later success.During her lifetime Eleanor Harrison’s work was very well received in Melbourne. Even before her return from Europe, a collection of her paintings was shown in Tom Roberts’s Collins Street studio (in April 1889). Charles Conder wrote enthusiastically to Roberts:I think you have a strong pair in the Harrisons, you know Mrs Harrison has a very good [picture] in the exhibition & I saw some impressions by her husband after your own heart …Table Talk 's critic attributed the correctness of the drawing in her exhibits at the VAS in 1890 to her French training and her 'years and years of experience and persevering study’. Her use of light was also frequently noted.The visiting American art critic Sidney Dickinson, a friend and admirer, praised Eleanor’s art for demonstrating the 'French system of landscape painting’. He lamented the lack of French art available for study in Melbourne at that time and drew the attention of his readers to a painting by her in a loan exhibition at the Exhibition Buildings in December 1890 to illustrate 'the elements which make French landscape art so influential and important’. The Melbourne Sun described The Poacher’s Daughter -'a poem in rich harmonious colouring’-at length. The pensive young peasant woman is keeping guard for her father while he poaches game in the Forest of Compiegne (which Eleanor Harrison had evidently painted on the spot, with snow on the ground amongst the lingering autumn leaves, in the winter of 1886). The Argus admired the 'influences of the contemporary school of French art’, i.e. the peasant subjects and tonal naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and his followers.Her work was comparatively highly priced, especially for a woman artist (130 guineas for A Winter Morning on the Coast of France ), and perhaps for that reason did not sell well before the auction in 1891. On this occasion not only the Harrisons’ paintings were offered but also their studio effects and a collection of 'curios’, which included a sketch of Lucerne by Gustave Courbet. In later years Birge Harrison seems never to have mentioned Eleanor. He may even have destroyed some of their Australian work after her tragically early death in 1895.

Writers:

Clark, Jane

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011