Eliza Rosanna Lamb Barchus (American, 1857-1959). Mount Hood, Oregon. Oil on canvas. 30 x 50 inches (76.2 x 127 cm). Sig...

Description

Eliza Rosanna Lamb Barchus (American, 1857-1959)
Mount Hood, Oregon
Oil on canvas
30 x 50 inches (76.2 x 127 cm)
Signed lower right: Barchus

PROPERTY FROM A RANCHO SANTA FE ESTATE

Please note this work is accompanied by a copy of Eliza R. Barchus: The Oregon Artist written by Agnes Barchus.

In celebration of Women's History Month Eliza Barchus was a prolific and enterprising 19th-century American landscape painter who lived in Portland, Oregon for most of her life. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Barchus moved with his husband to Portland in 1880 where she took lessons from landscape painter, Will S. Parrott. Barchus sold her first painting in 1885 for $1. Between then and 1935, she produced thousands of oil paintings of subjects such as Mounts Hood, Rainier and Shasta, Yellowstone Falls, Muir Glacier, and San Francisco Bay, which helped spread the beauty of the West to other parts of the country.
Barchus, who had won medals at Mechanics Fairs in Portland in the late 1880s, drew national attention in 1890, when one of her large canvases of Mount Hood was exhibited at the National Academy of Design exhibition in New York City. The work impressed viewers not only because of its subject, but because of the gender of its painter, a rarity for the time. In 1901, several of her works were shown at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and in 1905 she won a gold medal at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland for oil paintings of Pacific coast scenery.
Widowed in 1899, Barchus supported herself and her family for decades largely by selling or trading her art. Financial pressure forced her to produce thousands of pictures yet her larger works often revealed a talent that was lacking in some of her smaller paintings. Although she received criticism for her assembly-line style, she displayed considerable ability. Her style was so realistic that, as she liked to tell it, a friend's released canary once batted its wings against the water depicted in one of her paintings.
In 1935 failing eyesight and arthritis combined to bring her painting career to an end; she died twenty-four years later in 1959 at the age of 102. In 1957, on her one hundredth birthday, she was the subject of nostalgic newspaper articles and interviews, including one in "My Day," the nationally syndicated column by Eleanor Roosevelt. Fifteen years later, largely through the efforts of her daughter Agnes, the Oregon Legislature named Eliza Barchus "The Oregon Artist." Agnes also wrote a biography of her mother, Eliza R. Barchus: The Oregon Artist, published by Binford & Mort in 1974. Even today, Barchus continues to grow in popularity and her work is extremely collectible.



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