Eliza Barchus

Who was Eliza Barchus?

Eliza Barchus was a prolific, prize-winning landscape painter who lived in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon for most of her life. Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Barchus moved to Portland in 1880. After taking art lessons from another landscape painter, Will S. Parrott, Barchus sold her first painting in 1885. Between then and 1935, she produced thousands of oil paintings and reproductions of subjects such as Mount Hood, Yellowstone Falls, Muir Glacier, and San Francisco Bay.

Barchus, who had won medals at Mechanics Fairs in Portland in the late 1880s, drew national attention in 1890, when one of her large canvases of Mount Hood was displayed at the National Academy of Design exhibition in New York City. In 1901, several of her works were shown at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and in 1905 she won a gold medal at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland for oil paintings of Pacific coast scenery.

Widowed in 1899, Barchus supported herself and her family for decades largely by selling or trading her art. Several years after her death at age 102, the Oregon Legislative Assembly named her "The Oregon Artist".