| Eleanor Patterson Spencer | |
| Birth Date: | 1895 |
| Birth Place: | Northampton, Massachusetts |
| Death Date: | November 19, 1992 |
| Death Place: | Paris |
| Occupation: | Art historian, college professor, writer |
| Known For: | Professor of Fine Arts, Goucher College (1930-1962) |
Eleanor Patterson Spencer (1895 – November 19, 1992) was an American art historian and college professor.
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. 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.
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. She died in 1992, aged 97 years, in Paris. 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.