Blue Macaw

Elizabeth Norton

Elizabeth Norton’s subject matter was often drawn from the animal kingdom and she explained it thus: “I never would play with dolls. I just liked anything alive—whether it was crickets or grasshoppers, lizards or dogs or cats or horses…. The Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago was a second home to me when I was young. I used to go and feed the elephants as a small child.” As she became more proficient at painting, the zoo superintendent allowed her to go inside the barrier between the crowds and cages. She later mused, “I spent a lot of time in the lion house. I was crazy about lions, and the superintendent often let me pet their best lion, Leo, and carry some of the lion cubs.”

Elizabeth Norton was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 16, 1887 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1910, the Art Students' League, National Academy of Design and the Chase School in New York (now Parsons School of Design). She traveled to California in 1915 to see the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, returning in 1919 to make the San Francisco Bay Area her home.

As a child, Elizabeth Norton spent hours sketching the animals in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. She brought her passion for animals into her printmaking, creating a body of work that captured the dignity and individuality of animals, whether domesticated or wild, caged or in fishbowls. Other impressions of "Blue Macaw" have different colors on the body of the bird; red, yellow, orange.

As an adult she was known for her color relief printed depictions of animals, whether domestic or wild. She appreciated the characteristics of different species, often honing in on their most recognizable traits -- a puffed-chest peacock, a nervous shih tzu, a brilliant macaw, or an aloof, self-assured Siamese cat -- and portrayed them with as much attention as any human subject.

Her ouvre includes work in bronze, animals and portrait busts, watercolor and oil painting. She is best known for her printmaking, which included color relief, etching and lithography. She was instrumental in the founding of the Palo Alto Arts Club in 1921 and began printmaking the following year. She was a full member of the California Society of Etchers, California Printmakers, Prairie Printmakers, the Woodcut Society, the Federation of American Arts and the San Francisco Society of Women Artists. She exhibited extensively with the organizations and in commercial galleries including the Macbeth and Courvoisier galleries.

Elizabeth Norton died in Palo Alto, Santa Clara, California on August 6, 1985.