Eleanor Patterson Spencer

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]

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]

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]

• 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