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Eleanor Patterson Spencer

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Eleanor Patterson Spencer
A young white woman with dark hair brushed back from the face and fastened at the nape; she is wearing a white blouse with a dark ribbon tie.
Eleanor Patterson Spencer, from a 1917 Smith College yearbook.
Born1895
Northampton, Massachusetts
DiedNovember 19, 1992
Paris
Occupation(s)Art historian, college professor, writer
Known forProfessor of Fine Arts, Goucher College (1930-1962)

Eleanor Patterson Spencer (1895 – November 19, 1992) was an American art historian and college professor.

Early life

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Spencer was from Northampton, Massachusetts.[1] She attended Smith College, where she studied under Alfred Vance Churchill and edited the Smith College Weekly newspaper. She completed her undergraduate studies in 1917,[2] and earned a master's degree in art history in 1919, with a thesis titled "Jean-François Millet: His Relation to the Art of the Nineteenth Century". She spent a year of further studies at the Sorbonne,[3] before earning a Ph.D. at Radcliffe.[4][5] She became the first woman to receive the Sachs Research Fellowship in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1927, while she was a doctoral student.[6]

Career

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Spencer worked at the Parrish Art Museum as a young woman. She had short-term teaching positions at Mount Holyoke College (1919–1920) and Pine Manor College (1921–1927) early in her career.[4] She was a professor of fine arts at Goucher College from 1930 to 1962.[7] At Goucher, she taught a popular course in the history of architecture called "Houses and Housing",[8] and served on the faculty's planning committee, helping to shape the campus's built environment.[9] She was co-author of The Architecture of Baltimore: A Pictorial History (1953, with Richard Hubbard Howland).[10] In 1937, she published a short biography of printer Anne Catharine Green.[11]

Spencer served on the governing board of the Society of Architectural Historians from 1954 to 1957, and was a trustee of the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Peale Museum.[4]

After the death of her parents, Spencer retired from Goucher College in 1962,[12] and moved to Paris. She held a Fulbright Scholarship and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies, for her project involving 15th-century manuscripts, especially the Sobieski Hours, a volume in the library of Windsor Castle.[13]

Personal life

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Spencer emphasized that she was "not a feminist" in a 1935 interview; she expected students to call her "Miss Spencer" rather than "Doctor Spencer", and she wore "brown tailored clothes, as a rule with a tie and a sport shirt," considering such garments more economical and practical for a teaching career.[1] She died in 1992, aged 97 years, in Paris.[13] A gallery at Goucher College was named in her memory, and a travel scholarship fund was named for her. In 1994, there was an exhibition titled "A Bouquet of French Manuscripts: An Exhibition Remembering Eleanor Spencer" at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore.[4]

Publications

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  • The printer's relict : an example to her sex, 1937
  • L'Horloge de sapience, Bruxelles, Bibliothèque royale, Ms. IV. 111, 1963
  • L'horloge de sapience, 1964
  • Gerson, Ciboule and the Bedford master's shop. (Bruxelles, Bibl. Royale, Ms. IV. 111, Part II.), 1965
  • The Master of the Duke of Bedford: the Salisbury breviary, 1966
  • The First patron of the "Tres Belles Henres de Notre-Dame.", 1969
  • Dom Louis de Busco's psalter, 1974
  • The Sobieski Hours : a manuscript in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, 1977

References

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  1. ^ a b "A Yankee--And Mighty Proud of It". The Evening Sun. 1935-05-03. p. 3. Retrieved 2020-06-28 – via Newspapers.com.
  2. ^ President, Smith College (1917). Annual Report. p. 34.
  3. ^ "Class of 1917". The Smith Alumnae Quarterly. 7: 167. February 1921.
  4. ^ a b c d Sherman, Claire Richter (1996). "Eleanor Patterson Spencer as Educator and Scholar". The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery. 54: 255–266. ISSN 0083-7156. JSTOR 20169121.
  5. ^ "Goucher Club to Hold Annual Dinner March 18". The Morning News. 1937-03-06. p. 4. Retrieved 2020-06-28 – via Newspapers.com.
  6. ^ A.V.C. (June 1927). "The Sachs Research Fellowship". Bulletin of Smith College Museum of Art. 1: 20.
  7. ^ "Discusses Manuscripts at Hopkins Art Gallery". The Baltimore Sun. 1935-01-25. p. 4. Retrieved 2020-06-28 – via Newspapers.com.
  8. ^ "Miss Spencer, in Winning Goucher, is Won by City (continued)". The Baltimore Sun. 1962-06-04. p. 21. Retrieved 2020-06-28 – via Newspapers.com.
  9. ^ "History of the Buildings on Goucher's Towson Campus". Goucher College. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
  10. ^ Howland, Richard Hubbard; Spencer, Eleanor Patterson (1953). The Architecture of Baltimore: A Pictorial History. Johns Hopkins Press.
  11. ^ Spencer, Eleanor Patterson (1937). The printer's relict; an example of her sex, by Eleanor P. Spencer. Baltimore: Amphora Press. OCLC 79234831.
  12. ^ "Miss Spencer, in Winning Goucher, is Won by City". The Baltimore Sun. 1962-06-04. p. 30. Retrieved 2020-06-28 – via Newspapers.com.
  13. ^ a b "Eleanor Spencer, 97, Medieval-Art Scholar". The New York Times. 1992-11-19. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-28.
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