On September 16, 2019, Kathie Manthorne and I arrived in Moret-sur-Loing—a medieval town located 74 kilometers southwest of Paris. Kathie was putting the finishing touches on her latest book Restless Enterprise; The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex, which would be released the following year. Eliza Greatorex (1819-1897) was an Irish-born American artist who belonged to a circle of leading New York feminists. She spent her final years in the town where her friend Alfred Sisley resided. Kathie had followed Eliza’s footsteps from her birthplace in Donegal, to Upstate New York and Manhattan, and from Hudson Valley to the Rock Mountains of Colorado, England, and now France. A few days before Kathie was to address a conference at Musée d’Orsay, we spent two days in Moret, hoping to locate Eliza’s final residence and her grave, if time allowed. This is the tale of what happened.
Neither Kathie nor I knew the town, and no street address had been found to guide us to Eliza’s final abode, except for a single word—Ramparts. Our only other clues were two letters—one written by Eleanor Greatorex sometime before 1908, and another by an American woman visiting Kathleen Greatorex in 1909. Neither are very specific. Both describe a house and its garden, nestled among ancient walls. The return address on the letters is simply Ramparts, Moret-sur Loing. Twelfth-century walls punctuated at regular intervals by cylindrical towers still encompass much of the town. Pressed for time to unravel this mystery, we sprang into action and went in search of the nearest café.
Approaching noon on Monday, all of France would be shutting down for its quotidian midday pause. We walked through the Tour de Samois to the Rue des Granges, where a young man was setting out tables and chairs under red umbrellas along the narrow byway. Europop music flooded into the street from the open door of Le P’tit Moret restaurant, which was just getting ready to open. Having eaten nothing since what passes for meals in Economy Plus, we were famished and decided to press on. Rue des Granges led us to the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville; a broad, open square paved with flagstones, which inclined gently upwards toward Rue Grande. The town hall had originally been the residence of a wealthy bourgeois family, built on the remains of a much older inn. Napoleon Elba, slept in the house following his escape from Elba, on the night before his return to Paris. Adjacent to the Hotel de Ville stands a timbered building with a glazed storefront; the home of Les Amis de Sisley—a benevolent society dedicated to promoting the legacy of the famed Impressionist painter who lived and died in Moret.
A lanky waiter waves us into a pair of empty chairs. His long hair is knotted up into a chignon-de-homme, which sounds a lot better than man-bun. He hands us two menus and explains that while the bar is open, the kitchen is not. I looked at my watch. As it would be happy-hour in Manhattan, I ordered a beer for myself and a Chardonnay for Kathie. We drained our glasses and ordered a second round. When the waiter returned with the drinks, he announced that the kitchen was open. We ordered a charcuterie plate, a couple of salads, and a large bottle of Badoit. The restaurant—La Maison des Arts—occupies the ground floor of Maison Racollet—an ornate, half-timbered medieval-revival building designed by a local cabinetmaker, whose personal avatar was a rat dipping its tail in a glue-pot; a jeu-des-mots of his name. The French word for “rat” is the same as it is in English, but pronounced with a silent “t.” A homonym of “. . . collet” is coller, which in French means “to paste.” Racollet’s sense of humor is evident in a tiny self-portrait, and other small figures carved into the wooden pilasters of the building’s façade. I was reminded of the caricature of Tintoretto, carved above one of the stall-seats on the piano nobile of Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, and of Tilman Riemenschneider’s limewood holzschitzerein; an art-form preserved to this day by Oberammergau wood-carvers.
Click on the image below to lean more about Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex. University of California Press. 2020
My 22-year-old self had not sufficiently developed to pose the best questions, but I was struck my his gentlemanly demeanor that stood in contrast to the truculent swagger adopted by many painters at that time. Porter’s passing in 1975 was unexpected. A collection of his essays, articles, and lectures was assembled and edited by Rackstraw Downes. His lucid prose conveys a blend of erudition and delight in making and looking at art, in a voice from a time when the art world had not forgotten the true value of art.
A number of these are pinned on a bulletin-board hanging just outside of the gallery, beside a table filled with books about water for readers of all ages,