Tired Out
Eleanor Ritchie Harrison
Details
- Artist
- Eleanor Ritchie Harrison
- Title
- Tired Out
- Year
- 1882
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Size
- 51 x 58 cm
- Details
signed lower right: E Ritchie
partial label verso: No 8 Tired Out
Exhibited
Thirteenth Exhibition, Victorian Academy of Arts, Melbourne, March 1883, no. 8
Literature
Ladies’ column. Exhibition of the Victorian Academy of Arts’, The Herald (Melbourne), 3 March 1883, p3
“In No 8, ‘Tired Out’, Miss E. Ritchie gives a pleasing picture, the subject is one often seen in real life. A young child, weary with toiling up the [?] sandy ascent, has thrown herself down and fallen asleep, the half cross and wholly tired look still resting on the little face.”
Further Information
Eleanor Ritchie was born in the Western District of Victoria and briefly attended the National Gallery of Victoria School under Eugene von Guerard. Later studies in Europe reignited her desire to paint, further inspired by her marriage in 1883 to the American painter Birge Harrison whom she met in France. They travelled widely including to New Mexico, America, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, France and Australia, in 1889-1891, where her paintings were shown to acclaim. She sent artworks to exhibitions at the Victorian Academy of Arts in 1882 and 1883 depicting scenes of Brittany, including this painting. She was also included in the Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition of 1888-89 where she was awarded a second order of merit (along with Tom Roberts and Alice Chapman). Eleanor Ritchie Harrison’s painting La Mere Honore was hung at the Paris Salon in 1886 where her work was also shown in 1887 and 1888.
In 1887, the couple settled for 18 months in Etaples, an area which subsequently attracted many other Australian artists including E Phillips Fox, Tudor St George Tucker, Iso Rae. Tragically, Eleanor Ritchie Harrison died at a young age, following the death of her son in childbirth in 1895. Her name has largely been forgotten by art history, however in the current era of the ‘rediscovery’ of women artists, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has acquired her painting A Winter Morning on the Coast of France 1888 (oil on canvas, 88.x 159 cm) included in the exhibition Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890 – 1940 (AGSA and AGNSW 2025) along with Hilda Rix Nicholas, Dorrit Black, Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor.
Despite contemporary descriptions reviewing an exhibition in Melbourne in 1891 indicating 18 works, there are currently only very limited known paintings by Eleanor Ritchie Harrison in existence, one of the first Australian women to undertake a career as a professional artist and one of the earliest expatriate artists working in France.
Her paintings received much critical commentary at the exhibition in 1891, recognising the French influence and her ability to evoke atmosphere and human interest and empathy.
“Some of the work, and perhaps the strongest and best of them have been painted in France, and exhibit the influences of the contemporary school of France art upon the executants, both of whom, however, see nature with their own eyes, and interpret what they see with their own eyes, and interpret what they see with an apprehensive feeling of the sentiment both of the scene and of the season, of the period of the day and the cheerfulness or melancholy influences of the enveloping atmosphere. This is especially noticeable in Mrs Harrison’s triste, Winter on the Coast of France, with its cold grey sky, its stretch of sandy heath, and the group of trees contorted by the strong sea-breeze blowing inland.” Art Notes The Argus Fri 22 May 1891 p 10