Full Name: Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet
Other Names:
- Elizabeth Fries Lummis
- E. F. Ellet
Gender: female
Date Born: 18 October 1818
Date Died: 03 June 1877
Place Born: Sodus Point, New York, USA
Place Died: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): women (female humans)Women and women art historians
Career(s): authors
Overview
First person to publish a history of women artists in English. Lummis’ parents were both from prestigious families. Her mother was Sarah Maxwell (1780–1849) and father William Nixon Lummis (1775–1833), a physician. Elizabeth Lummis attended Aurora Female Seminary in Aurora, New York, where she studied languages (French, German and Italian). At age 16, using her language skills, she published a translation of Euphemio of Messina by the writer Silvio Pellico (1789-1854).
Lumens saw her career in literature. In 1835 she published her first book Poems, Translated and Original. During this time she also met and married William Henry Ellet (1806–1859), a chemist in New York City. William secured a teaching job at South Carolina College,(today University of South Carolina) Columbia, South Carolina, in 1836. She continued her literary ambitions publishing an essay on and translations of the work of Friedrich Schiller. In 1839; Scenes in the Life of Joanna of Sicily, a history of female nobility; and a travelogue, Rambles about the Country in 1840. Her contributions appeared in American Monthly, the North American Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, and the Southern Quarterly Review.
Ellet departed from her husband in 1845, returning to New York City and literary society. She was one of several women who purportedly had amorous intentions with Edgar Allan Poe, also in the city. Her interest in women’s studies emerged as early as 1846 when she began researching unpublished primary documents for a book on women participating in the American Revolution. Though jointly researched by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815-1857) he was never acknowledged. It appeared in two volumes in 1848 with a third volume (and another book) in 1850. Her husband joined her in New York, where he worked as a chemical consultant for the Manhattan Gas Company. Elizabeth continued to publish works, including a 600-page encyclopedia of American home economics entitled The Practical Housekeeper in 1857.
In 1859 she issued Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, the first history of women artists in English. She acknowledged in her preface that her work owed some debt to the German Die Frauen in die Kunstgeschichte by Ernest Guhl. Her selection of artists began with Kora of Sicyon (650 BCE), then the Ottonian (German) dramatist Hroswitha (c. 935–973), following through to Hildegard of Bingen, Plautilla Nelli, Sabina Von Steinback, Margaretta van Eyck, Caterina Vigri, Marietta Tintoretto, Sofonisba Anguissola, Levina Teerlinc. She also covers the more contemporary Lavinia Fontana, Elisabetta Sirani, Artemisia Gentileschi, Luisa Roldán, Maria van Oosterwijck, Rachel Ruysch, Maria Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Mary Moser, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Félicie de Fauveau, Rosa Bonheur, Emma Stebbins, and Harriet Hosmer. Like most books on art of her time, it was without illustrations.
In 1857, Ellet succeeded Ann Sophia Stephens (1810-1886) as the editor of the New York Evening Express. Her husband died two years later in 1859. She continued to write. She converted to Catholicism and championed the causes of impoverished women. In 1877 she succumbed to Bright’s Disease in New York City and is buried with her husband at Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.
Ellet was the first historian to write about women artists in English. Her Women Artists In All Ages and Countries was written, as were he other books, for a popular audience. The book “marked an important event in the history of art and women’s studies” (Langer). Sparrow noted in 1905 that Mrs. Ellet, as an historian, was addressing herself in her book to the question of women artists–reflecting and accepting the prejudices of her discipline at the time. Her activism and feminism, in addition to her women’s-studies writing manifested itself in her intervention to the divorce case Griswold, her ghost partner, in 1852, who was divorcing his wife to marry another. Her feminism was inspired in part by Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741–1796) and his On Improving the Status of Women (1795). She raised the ire of the early woman art historian Mrs. Anna Jameson when Ellet defended Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting.
Selected Bibliography
- The Women of the American Revolution. 3 vols. New York: Baker and Scribner, 1848 and 1850.
- and Riker, John C., Pioneer Women of the West. New York: C. Scribner, 1852.
- Summer Rambles in the West. New York: J.C. Riker, 1853
- The Practical Housekeeper. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1857.
- Women Artists in All Ages and Countries. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859.
- The Queens of American Society New York: C. Scribner, 1867.
- Court Circles of the Republic. Hartford, CT: Hartford Pub. Co., 1869.
Sources
- Jameson, Mrs Anna. [review of Women Artists in All Ages], Monthly Review, № 151,
- Sparrow, Walter, ed. Women Painters of the World. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1905, p. 75.
- Langer, Sandra L “Reviews and Reviews.” Woman’s Art Journal 1, no. 2 (Autumn, 1980 – Winter, 1981): 55–58.
- Mattingly, Carol. “Legacy Profile: Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet (1818-1877).” Legacy 18, No. 1, (2001): 101-106.
- Conrad, Susan Phinney. Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Archives
- Elizabeth Fries Ellet papers. New York Public Library https://archives.nypl.org/mss/9786 (Duyckinck, Ford, and Stauffer collections);
- Yale University (Beinecke Library–Ellet papers);
- Harvard University (Houghton Library—Ellet letters and
Sparks manuscripts); - Boston Public Library (Griswold manuscripts) (also on microfilm at Duke
University Library); - Library of Congress (Lewis Reeves Gibbes collection);
- Connecticut Historical Society (Hoadley collection).