Eleanor Parke Custis

1897 - 1983

Eleanor Parke Custis, an only child, was born in 1897 in Washington, DC. She was given her first Brownie camera when she was twelve and was soon printing her own negatives. At the age of sixteen, she began painting watercolors and in 1915 started her career as an artist with a three-year program at the Corcoran School of Art. She is perhaps still best known for her watercolors and was an active and successful member of the Gloucester art community during the first half of the early 20th century.

Her interest in photography was rekindled in 1933, and she returned from a visit to the Mediterranean with as many photographs as paintings. The influence of photography can be seen in these paintings where the figures and objects are no longer confined neatly within the borders of the canvas but pass beyond them, as in a photograph. A decade later she put her theory that universal principles governed the creation of both paintings and photographs into a book titled Composition and Pictures.

Eleanor Parke Custis right (undated photograph). left c. 1935. Custis Collection of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives, Gloucester, MA.

By the 1930s she was writing about photography, serving as a juror for photography salons, and in 1937 was elected an Associate of the Photographic Society of America, and of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. She began exhibiting her photographs internationally and won numerous awards. By the mid 1940s, she was almost totally absorbed in photography and in 1946 was honored with a solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Institute.

Eleanor Parke Custis first came to Gloucester as a child with her parents, staying at the Rockaway Hotel on Rocky Neck. She returned as a young woman, taking up residence at Wonsonhurst, a group of wharf buildings owned by the Wonson family of East Gloucester, who rented them out each summer as studio and living spaces for visiting artists. In the late 1940s she purchased a house at the top of Banner Hill overlooking Smith Cove and the Inner Harbor and continued to spend her summers there. She made it her permanent home from 1960 until her death in 1983.

Some of the many photography awards received by Eleanor Parke Custis during her lifetime. Collection of the Cape Ann Museum Library & Archives, Gloucester, MA.