Eliza was a noted landscape and cityscape painter, etcher and drawing master – especially known for her pen and ink drawings of New York City. She was born on Christmas Day 1919 in Teapot Lane, Manorhamilton where her father James Calcott Pratt was serving as a Wesleyan Methodist minister. He moved the family to New York when she was twenty-one. Both Eliza and her sister Matilda were encouraged to develop their talents as artists and writers. When Eliza was thirty she married Henry Wellington Greatorex, a relatively well-known composer of church music. They had three children. Henry Greatorex died unexpectedly in 1858 when Eliza was only thirty-nine. She settled in New York and opened an artist’s studio on Broadway. There she supported herself and her young family by teaching at a girls’ school, giving private lessons and selling her own work. All this time she continued her own studies, working with William H. Witherspoon and James Hart. She also studied in Paris and travelled extensively. The National Academy of Design in New York elected Eliza an associate in 1869, the only living female so honoured. Although she began as a landscape painter, she later devoted herself to pen-and–ink sketches which greatly enhanced her reputation. Notable among her books were the Homes of Oberammergau (1872) and Summer Etchings in Colorado (1873). She died in 1897.
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