Cecilia Beaux
Encyclopedia
Cecilia Beaux was an American
society portraitist, in the manner of John Singer Sargent
. She was a near contemporary of better-known American artist Mary Cassatt
and also received her training in Philadelphia and France
. Her sympathetic renderings of American ruling class made her one of the most successful portrait painters
of her era.
, the youngest daughter of French silk
manufacturer Jean Adolphe Beaux and teacher Cecilia Kent Leavitt, daughter of prominent businessman John Wheeler Leavitt
of New York City
and his wife Cecilia Kent of Suffield, Connecticut
. Cecilia Kent Leavitt died from puerperal fever
12 days after giving birth at age 33. Cecilia "Leilie" Beaux and her sister Etta were subsequently raised by their maternal grandmother and aunts, primarily in Philadelphia. Her father, unable to bear the grief of his loss, and feeling adrift in a foreign country, returned to his native France for 16 years, with only one visit back to Philadelphia. He returned when Cecilia was two, but left four years later after his business failed. As she confessed later, "We didn’t love Papa very much, he was so foreign. We thought him peculiar." Her father did have a natural aptitude for drawing and the sisters were charmed by his whimsical sketches of animals. Later, Beaux would discover that her French heritage would serve her well during her pilgrimage and training in France.
In Philadelphia, Beaux's aunt Emily married mining engineer William Foster Biddle, whom Beaux would later describe as "after my grandmother, the strongest and most beneficent influence in my life." For fifty years, he cared for his nieces-in-law with consistent attention and occasional financial support. Her grandmother, on the other hand, provided day-to-day supervision and kindly discipline. Whether with housework, handiwork, or academics, Grandma Leavitt offered a pragmatic framework, stressing that "everything undertaken must be completed, conquered." The Civil War
years were particularly challenging, but the extended family survived despite little emotional or financial support from Beaux's father.
After the war, Beaux began to spend some time in the household of "Willie" and Emily, both proficient musicians. Beaux learned to play the piano but preferred singing. The musical atmosphere later proved an advantage for her artistic ambitions. Beaux recalled, "They understood perfectly the spirit and necessities of an artist's life." In her early teens, she had her first major exposure to art during visits with Willie to the nearby Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
, one of America's foremost art schools and museums. Though fascinated by the narrative elements of some of the pictures, particularly the Biblical themes of the massive paintings of Benjamin West
, at this point Beaux had no aspirations of becoming an artist.
Her childhood was a sheltered though generally happy one. As a teen she already manifested the traits, as she described, of "both a realist and a perfectionist, pursued by an uncompromising passion for carrying through." She attended the Misses Lyman School and was just an average student, though she did well in French and Natural History. However, she was unable to afford the extra fee for art lessons. At age 16, Beaux began art lessons with a relative, Catharine Ann Drinker, an accomplished artist who had her own studio and a going clientele. Drinker became Beaux's role model, and she continued lessons with Drinker for a year. She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction. Given the bias of the Victorian age, female students were denied direct study in anatomy and could not attend drawing classes with live models (who were often prostitutes) until a decade later.
At 18, Beaux was appointed drawing teacher at Miss Sanford's School, taking over Drinker's post. She also gave private art lessons, and produced decorative art and small portraits. Her own studies were mostly self-directed. Beaux received her first introduction to lithography
doing copy work for Philadelphia printer Thomas Sinclair and she published her first work in St. Nicholas magazine in December 1873. Beaux demonstrated accuracy and patience as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for Edward Drinker Cope
, for a multi-volume report sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey. However, she did not find technical illustration suitable for a career (the extreme exactitude required gave her pains in the "solar plexus"). At this stage, she did not yet consider herself an artist.
Beaux began attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876, then under the dynamic influence of Thomas Eakins
, whose great work The Gross Clinic
had "horrified Philadelphia Exhibition-goers as a gory spectacle" at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. She steered clear of the controversial Eakins, though she much admired his work. His progressive teaching philosophy, focused on anatomy and live study (and allowed the female students to partake in segregated studios), eventually led to his firing as director of the Academy. She did not ally herself with Eakins' ardent student supporters, and later wrote, "A curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle." Instead, she attended costume and portrait painting classes for three years taught by the ailing director Christian Schussele
.
After leaving the Academy, the 24-year-old Beaux decided to try her hand at porcelain painting and she enrolled in a course at the National Art Training School. She was well suited to the precise work but later wrote, "this was the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art, and although it was a period when youth and romance were in their first attendance on me, I remember it with gloom and record it with shame." She studied privately with William Sartain, a friend of Eakins and a New York artist invited to Philadelphia to teach a group of art students, starting in 1881. Though Beaux admired Eakins more and thought his painting skill superior to Sartain's, she preferred the latter's gentle teaching style which promoted no particular aesthetic approach. Unlike Eakins, however, Sartain believed in phrenology
and Beaux adopted a lifelong belief that physical characteristics correlated with behaviors and traits.
Beaux attended Sartain's classes for two years, then rented her own studio and shared it with a group of women artists who hired a live model and continued without an instructor. After the group disbanded, Beaux set in earnest to prove her artistic abilities. She painted a large canvas in 1884, Les Derniers Jours d'enfance, a portrait of her sister and nephew whose composition and style revealed a debt to James McNeill Whistler
and whose subject matter was akin to Mary Cassatt
's mother-and-child paintings. It was awarded a prize for the best painting by a female artist at the Academy, and further exhibited in Philadelphia and New York. Following that seminal painting, she painted over 50 portraits in the next three years with the zeal of a committed professional artist. Her invitation to serve as a juror on the hanging committee of the Academy confirmed her acceptance amongst her peers. In the mid-1880s, she was receiving commissions from notable Philadelphians and earning $500 per portrait, comparable to what Eakins commanded. When her friend Margaret Bush-Brown insisted that Les Derniers was good enough to be exhibited at the famed Paris Salon
, Beaux relented and sent the painting abroad in the care of her friend, who managed to get the painting into the exhibition.
with cousin May Whitlock, forsaking several suitors and overcoming the objections of her family. There she trained at the Académie Julian
, the largest art school in Paris, and at the Académie Colarossi
, receiving weekly critiques from established masters like Tony Robert-Fleury
and William-Adolphe Bouguereau
. She wrote, "Fleury is much less benign than Bouguereau and don't temper his severities…he hinted of possibilities before me and as he rose said the nicest thing of all, 'we will do all we can to help you'…I want these men…to know me and recognize that I can do something." Though advised regularly of Beaux’s progress abroad and to "not be worried about any indiscretions of ours", her Aunt Eliza repeatedly reminded her niece to avoid the temptations of Paris, "Remember you are first of all a Christian – then a woman and last of all an Artist."
When Beaux arrived in Paris, the Impressionists
, a group of artists who had begun their own series of independent exhibitions from the official Salon in 1874, were beginning to lose their solidarity. Also known as the "Independents" or "Intransigents", the group which at times included Degas, Monet, Sisley
, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Renoir
, and Berthe Morisot
, had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years. Their art, though varying in style and technique, was the antithesis of the type of Academic art that Beaux was trained in and of which her teacher William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a leading master. In the summer of 1888, with classes in summer recess, Beaux worked in the fishing village of Concarneau
with the American painters Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar. She tried applying the plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with little success. Unlike her predecessor Mary Cassatt
, who had arrived near the beginning of the Impressionist movement 15 years earlier and who had absorbed it, Beaux's artistic temperament, precise and true to observation, would not align with Impressionism and she remained a realist painter for the rest of her career, even as Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso were beginning to take art into new directions. Beaux mostly admired classic artists like Titian
and Rembrandt. Her European training did influence her palette, however, and she adopted more white and paler coloration in her oil painting, particularly in depicting female subjects, an approach favored by Sargent as well.
Back in America in 1889, Beaux proceeded to paint portraits in the grand manner
, taking as her subjects members of her sister's family as well as the elite of Philadelphia. In making her decision to devote herself to art, she also thought it was best not to marry, and in choosing male company she selected men who would not threaten to sidetrack her career. She resumed life with her family, and they supported her fully, acknowledging her chosen path and demanding of her little in the way of household responsibilities, "I was never once asked to do an errand in town, some bit of shopping…so well did they understand." She developed a structured, professional routine, arriving promptly at her studio, and expected the same from her models.
The five years that followed were highly productive, resulting in over forty portraits. In 1890 she exhibited at the Paris Exposition, obtained in 1893 the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club, and also the Dodge prize at the New York National Academy of Design
. Her portrait of The Reverend Matthew Blackburne Grier was particularly well-received, as was Sita and Sarita, a portrait of her cousin Charles W. Leavitt's wife Sarah (Allibone) Leavitt in white, with a small black cat perched on her shoulder, both gazing out mysteriously. The mesmerizing effect prompted one critic to point out "the witch-like weirdness of the black kitten" and for many years, the painting solicited questions by the press. But the result was not pre-planned, as Beaux’s sister later explained, "Please make no mystery about it—it was only an idea to put the black kitten on her cousin's shoulder. Nothing deeper." Sita and Sarita eventually was donated by the artist to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay
. Another highly regarded portrait from that period is New England Woman (1895), a nearly all-white oil painting which was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
.
In 1895 Beaux became the first woman to have a regular teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she instructed in portrait drawing and painting for the next twenty years. That rare type of achievement by a woman prompted one local newspaper to state, "It is a legitimate source of pride to Philadelphia that one of its most cherished institutions has made this innovation." She was a popular instructor. In 1896, Beaux returned to France to see a group of her paintings presented at the Salon. Influential French critic M. Henri Rochefort commented, "I am compelled to admit, not without some chagrin, that not one of our female artists…is strong enough to compete with the lady who has given us this year the portrait of Dr. Grier. Composition, flesh, texture, sound drawing—everything is there without affectation, and without seeking for effect."
to Boston
, prompting the artist to move to New York City; it was there she spent the winters, while summering at Green Alley, the home and studio she had built in Gloucester, Massachusetts
. Beaux's friendship with Richard Gilder, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine The Century, helped promote her career and he introduced her to the elite of society. Among her portraits which followed from that association are those of Georges Clemenceau
; First Lady Edith Roosevelt
and her daughter; and Admiral Sir David Beatty
. She also sketched President Teddy Roosevelt during her White House
visits in 1902, during which "He sat for two hours, talking most of the time, reciting Kipling, and reading scraps of Browning
." Her portraits Fanny Travis Cochran, Dorothea and Francesca, and Ernesta and her Little Brother, are fine examples of her skill in painting children; Ernesta with Nurse, one of a series of essays in luminous white, was a highly original composition, seemingly without precedent. She won the Logan Medal of the arts
at the Art Institute of Chicago
, and became a member of the National Academy in 1902.
By 1906, Beaux began to live year-round at Green Alley, in a comfortable colony of "cottages" belonging to her wealthy friends and neighbors. All three aunts had died and she needed an emotional break from Philadelphia and New York. She managed to find new subjects for portraiture, working in the mornings and enjoying a leisurely life the rest of the time. She carefully regulated her energy and her activities to maintain a productive output, and considered that a key to her success. On why so few women succeeded in art as she did, she stated, "Strength is the stumbling block. They (women) are sometimes unable to stand the hard work of it day in and day out. They become tired and cannot reenergize themselves."
While Beaux stuck to her portraits of the elite, American art was advancing into urban and social subject matter, led by artists such as Robert Henri
who espoused a totally different aesthetic, "Work with great speed..Have your energies alert, up and active. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can. There is no use delaying…Stop studying water pitchers and bananas and paint everyday life." He advised his students, among them Edward Hopper
and Rockwell Kent
, to live with the common man and paint the common man, in total opposition to Cecilia Beaux’s artistic methods and subjects. The clash of Henri and William Merritt Chase
(representing Beaux and the traditional art establishment) resulted in 1907 in the independent exhibition by the urban realists known as "The Eight" or the Ashcan School
. Beaux and her art friends defended the old order, and many thought (and hoped) the new movement to be a passing fad, but it turned out to be a revolutionary turn in American art.
In 1910, her beloved Uncle Willie died. Though devastated by the loss, at fifty-five years of age, Beaux remained highly productive. In the next five years she painted almost 25 percent of her lifetime output and received a steady stream of honors. She had a major exhibition of 35 paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
in Washington, D.C. in 1912. Despite her continuing production and accolades, however, Beaux was working against the current of tastes and trends in art. The famed "Armory Show" of 1913 in New York City was a landmark presentation of 1,200 paintings showcasing Modernism
. Beaux believed that the public, initially of mixed opinion about the "new" art, would ultimately reject it and return its favor to the Pre-Impressionists. But she was wrong; the art the traditionalists deemed "not only incompetent, but grotesque" came to dominate the 20th century.
Beaux was crippled after breaking her hip while walking in Paris in 1924. With her health impaired, her work output dwindled for the remainder of her life. That same year Beaux was asked to produce a self-portrait for the Medici collection in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In 1930 she published an autobiography
, Background with Figures. Her later life was filled with honors. In 1930 she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1933 came membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which two years later organized the first major retrospective of her work. Also in 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt
honored Beaux as "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world". In 1942 The National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her a gold medal for lifetime achievement.
. In her will she devised that a Duncan Phyfe
rosewood secretaire made for her father go to her cherished nephew Cecil Kent Drinker, a Harvard physician, whom she had painted as a young boy.
Though Beaux was an individualist, comparisons to Sargent would prove inevitable, and often favorable. Her strong technique, her perceptive reading of her subjects, and her ability to flatter without falsifying, were traits similar to his. "The critics are very enthusiastic. (Bernard) Berenson, Mrs. Coates tells me, stood in front of the portraits – Miss Beaux's three – and wagged his head. 'Ah, yes, I see!' Some Sargents. The ordinary ones are signed John Sargent, the best are signed Cecilia Beaux, which is, of course, nonsense in more ways than one, but it is part of the generous chorus of praise." Though overshadowed by Mary Cassatt
and relatively unknown to museum-goers today, Beaux's craftsmanship and extraordinary output were highly regarded in her time. While presenting the Carnegie Institute's Gold Medal to Beaux in 1899, William Merritt Chase
stated "Miss Beaux is not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived. Miss Beaux has done away entirely with sex [gender] in art."
During her long productive life as an artist, she maintained her personal aesthetic and high standards against all distractions and countervailing forces. She constantly struggled for perfection, "A perfect technique in anything," she stated in an interview, "means that there has been no break in continuity between the conception and the act of performance." She summed up her driving work ethic, "I can say this: When I attempt anything, I have a passionate determination to overcome every obstacle…And I do my own work with a refusal to accept defeat that might almost be called painful."
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
society portraitist, in the manner of John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...
. She was a near contemporary of better-known American artist Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
and also received her training in Philadelphia and France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. Her sympathetic renderings of American ruling class made her one of the most successful portrait painters
Portrait painting
Portrait painting is a genre in painting, where the intent is to depict the visual appearance of the subject. Beside human beings, animals, pets and even inanimate objects can be chosen as the subject for a portrait...
of her era.
Early life
Cecilia Beaux was born in Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaPennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, the youngest daughter of French silk
Silk
Silk is a natural protein fiber, some forms of which can be woven into textiles. The best-known type of silk is obtained from the cocoons of the larvae of the mulberry silkworm Bombyx mori reared in captivity...
manufacturer Jean Adolphe Beaux and teacher Cecilia Kent Leavitt, daughter of prominent businessman John Wheeler Leavitt
John Wheeler Leavitt
My grandparents were both of Puritan New England stock, English entirely. Their ancestors had been early settlers in the northern and western part of Connecticut...
of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and his wife Cecilia Kent of Suffield, Connecticut
Suffield, Connecticut
Suffield is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States. It had once been within the boundaries of Massachusetts. The town is located in the Connecticut River Valley with the town of Enfield neighboring to the east. In 1900, 3,521 people lived in Suffield; and in 1910, 3,841. As of the...
. Cecilia Kent Leavitt died from puerperal fever
Puerperal fever
Puerperal fever or childbed fever, is a bacterial infection contracted by women during childbirth or miscarriage. It can develop into puerperal sepsis, which is a serious form of septicaemia. If untreated, it is often fatal....
12 days after giving birth at age 33. Cecilia "Leilie" Beaux and her sister Etta were subsequently raised by their maternal grandmother and aunts, primarily in Philadelphia. Her father, unable to bear the grief of his loss, and feeling adrift in a foreign country, returned to his native France for 16 years, with only one visit back to Philadelphia. He returned when Cecilia was two, but left four years later after his business failed. As she confessed later, "We didn’t love Papa very much, he was so foreign. We thought him peculiar." Her father did have a natural aptitude for drawing and the sisters were charmed by his whimsical sketches of animals. Later, Beaux would discover that her French heritage would serve her well during her pilgrimage and training in France.
In Philadelphia, Beaux's aunt Emily married mining engineer William Foster Biddle, whom Beaux would later describe as "after my grandmother, the strongest and most beneficent influence in my life." For fifty years, he cared for his nieces-in-law with consistent attention and occasional financial support. Her grandmother, on the other hand, provided day-to-day supervision and kindly discipline. Whether with housework, handiwork, or academics, Grandma Leavitt offered a pragmatic framework, stressing that "everything undertaken must be completed, conquered." The Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
years were particularly challenging, but the extended family survived despite little emotional or financial support from Beaux's father.
After the war, Beaux began to spend some time in the household of "Willie" and Emily, both proficient musicians. Beaux learned to play the piano but preferred singing. The musical atmosphere later proved an advantage for her artistic ambitions. Beaux recalled, "They understood perfectly the spirit and necessities of an artist's life." In her early teens, she had her first major exposure to art during visits with Willie to the nearby Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
, one of America's foremost art schools and museums. Though fascinated by the narrative elements of some of the pictures, particularly the Biblical themes of the massive paintings of Benjamin West
Benjamin West
Benjamin West, RA was an Anglo-American painter of historical scenes around and after the time of the American War of Independence...
, at this point Beaux had no aspirations of becoming an artist.
Her childhood was a sheltered though generally happy one. As a teen she already manifested the traits, as she described, of "both a realist and a perfectionist, pursued by an uncompromising passion for carrying through." She attended the Misses Lyman School and was just an average student, though she did well in French and Natural History. However, she was unable to afford the extra fee for art lessons. At age 16, Beaux began art lessons with a relative, Catharine Ann Drinker, an accomplished artist who had her own studio and a going clientele. Drinker became Beaux's role model, and she continued lessons with Drinker for a year. She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction. Given the bias of the Victorian age, female students were denied direct study in anatomy and could not attend drawing classes with live models (who were often prostitutes) until a decade later.
At 18, Beaux was appointed drawing teacher at Miss Sanford's School, taking over Drinker's post. She also gave private art lessons, and produced decorative art and small portraits. Her own studies were mostly self-directed. Beaux received her first introduction to lithography
Lithography
Lithography is a method for printing using a stone or a metal plate with a completely smooth surface...
doing copy work for Philadelphia printer Thomas Sinclair and she published her first work in St. Nicholas magazine in December 1873. Beaux demonstrated accuracy and patience as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for Edward Drinker Cope
Edward Drinker Cope
Edward Drinker Cope was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, as well as a noted herpetologist and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, Cope distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science; he published his first scientific paper at the age of nineteen...
, for a multi-volume report sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey. However, she did not find technical illustration suitable for a career (the extreme exactitude required gave her pains in the "solar plexus"). At this stage, she did not yet consider herself an artist.
Beaux began attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876, then under the dynamic influence of Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
, whose great work The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic
The Gross Clinic, or, The Clinic of Dr. Gross, is an 1875 painting by American artist Thomas Eakins. It is oil on canvas and measures by . Dr. Samuel D. Gross, a seventy-year-old professor dressed in a black frock coat, lectures a group of Jefferson Medical College students...
had "horrified Philadelphia Exhibition-goers as a gory spectacle" at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. She steered clear of the controversial Eakins, though she much admired his work. His progressive teaching philosophy, focused on anatomy and live study (and allowed the female students to partake in segregated studios), eventually led to his firing as director of the Academy. She did not ally herself with Eakins' ardent student supporters, and later wrote, "A curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle." Instead, she attended costume and portrait painting classes for three years taught by the ailing director Christian Schussele
Christian Schussele
Christian Schussele was an artist. He studied under Adolphe Yvon and Paul Delaroche 1842-1848 and then came to the United States. Here, for some time, he worked at chromolithography which he had also pursued in France. Later he devoted himself almost entirely to painting...
.
After leaving the Academy, the 24-year-old Beaux decided to try her hand at porcelain painting and she enrolled in a course at the National Art Training School. She was well suited to the precise work but later wrote, "this was the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art, and although it was a period when youth and romance were in their first attendance on me, I remember it with gloom and record it with shame." She studied privately with William Sartain, a friend of Eakins and a New York artist invited to Philadelphia to teach a group of art students, starting in 1881. Though Beaux admired Eakins more and thought his painting skill superior to Sartain's, she preferred the latter's gentle teaching style which promoted no particular aesthetic approach. Unlike Eakins, however, Sartain believed in phrenology
Phrenology
Phrenology is a pseudoscience primarily focused on measurements of the human skull, based on the concept that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that certain brain areas have localized, specific functions or modules...
and Beaux adopted a lifelong belief that physical characteristics correlated with behaviors and traits.
Beaux attended Sartain's classes for two years, then rented her own studio and shared it with a group of women artists who hired a live model and continued without an instructor. After the group disbanded, Beaux set in earnest to prove her artistic abilities. She painted a large canvas in 1884, Les Derniers Jours d'enfance, a portrait of her sister and nephew whose composition and style revealed a debt to James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
and whose subject matter was akin to Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
's mother-and-child paintings. It was awarded a prize for the best painting by a female artist at the Academy, and further exhibited in Philadelphia and New York. Following that seminal painting, she painted over 50 portraits in the next three years with the zeal of a committed professional artist. Her invitation to serve as a juror on the hanging committee of the Academy confirmed her acceptance amongst her peers. In the mid-1880s, she was receiving commissions from notable Philadelphians and earning $500 per portrait, comparable to what Eakins commanded. When her friend Margaret Bush-Brown insisted that Les Derniers was good enough to be exhibited at the famed Paris Salon
Paris Salon
The Salon , or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1725 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. Between 1748–1890 it was the greatest annual or biannual art event in the Western world...
, Beaux relented and sent the painting abroad in the care of her friend, who managed to get the painting into the exhibition.
Paris
At 32, despite her clear success in Philadelphia, Beaux decided that she still needed to advance her skills. She left for ParisParis
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
with cousin May Whitlock, forsaking several suitors and overcoming the objections of her family. There she trained at the Académie Julian
Académie Julian
The Académie Julian was an art school in Paris, France.Rodolphe Julian established the Académie Julian in 1868 at the Passage des Panoramas, as a private studio school for art students. The Académie Julian not only prepared students to the exams at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but offered...
, the largest art school in Paris, and at the Académie Colarossi
Académie Colarossi
The Académie Colarossi is an art school founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. First located on the Île de la Cité, it moved in the 1870s to 10 rue de la Grande-Chaumière in the VIe arrondissement of Paris, France....
, receiving weekly critiques from established masters like Tony Robert-Fleury
Tony Robert-Fleury
Tony Robert-Fleury was a French painter.He was born just outside Paris, and studied under his father Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury and under Delaroche and Léon Cogniet....
and William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.-Life and career :William-Adolphe...
. She wrote, "Fleury is much less benign than Bouguereau and don't temper his severities…he hinted of possibilities before me and as he rose said the nicest thing of all, 'we will do all we can to help you'…I want these men…to know me and recognize that I can do something." Though advised regularly of Beaux’s progress abroad and to "not be worried about any indiscretions of ours", her Aunt Eliza repeatedly reminded her niece to avoid the temptations of Paris, "Remember you are first of all a Christian – then a woman and last of all an Artist."
When Beaux arrived in Paris, the Impressionists
Impressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
, a group of artists who had begun their own series of independent exhibitions from the official Salon in 1874, were beginning to lose their solidarity. Also known as the "Independents" or "Intransigents", the group which at times included Degas, Monet, Sisley
Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life, in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air...
, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Renoir
Renoir
-People with the surname Renoir :* Pierre-Auguste Renoir , French painter* Pierre Renoir , French actor and son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir* Jean Renoir , French film director and son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir...
, and Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot
Berthe Morisot was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.In 1864, she exhibited for the first...
, had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years. Their art, though varying in style and technique, was the antithesis of the type of Academic art that Beaux was trained in and of which her teacher William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a leading master. In the summer of 1888, with classes in summer recess, Beaux worked in the fishing village of Concarneau
Concarneau
Concarneau is a commune in the Finistère department of Brittany in north-western France.The town has two distinct areas: the modern town on the mainland and the medieval Ville Close, a walled town on a long island in the centre of the harbour. Historically, the old town was a centre of shipbuilding...
with the American painters Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar. She tried applying the plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with little success. Unlike her predecessor Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
, who had arrived near the beginning of the Impressionist movement 15 years earlier and who had absorbed it, Beaux's artistic temperament, precise and true to observation, would not align with Impressionism and she remained a realist painter for the rest of her career, even as Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso were beginning to take art into new directions. Beaux mostly admired classic artists like Titian
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576 better known as Titian was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near...
and Rembrandt. Her European training did influence her palette, however, and she adopted more white and paler coloration in her oil painting, particularly in depicting female subjects, an approach favored by Sargent as well.
Return to Philadelphia
Grand manner
Grand Manner refers to an idealized aesthetic style derived from classical art, and the modern "classic art" of the High Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, British artists and connoisseurs used the term to describe paintings that incorporated visual metaphors in order to suggest noble qualities...
, taking as her subjects members of her sister's family as well as the elite of Philadelphia. In making her decision to devote herself to art, she also thought it was best not to marry, and in choosing male company she selected men who would not threaten to sidetrack her career. She resumed life with her family, and they supported her fully, acknowledging her chosen path and demanding of her little in the way of household responsibilities, "I was never once asked to do an errand in town, some bit of shopping…so well did they understand." She developed a structured, professional routine, arriving promptly at her studio, and expected the same from her models.
The five years that followed were highly productive, resulting in over forty portraits. In 1890 she exhibited at the Paris Exposition, obtained in 1893 the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club, and also the Dodge prize at the New York National Academy of Design
National Academy of Design
The National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts, founded in New York City as the National Academy of Design – known simply as the "National Academy" – is an honorary association of American artists founded in 1825 by Samuel F. B. Morse, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, Martin E...
. Her portrait of The Reverend Matthew Blackburne Grier was particularly well-received, as was Sita and Sarita, a portrait of her cousin Charles W. Leavitt's wife Sarah (Allibone) Leavitt in white, with a small black cat perched on her shoulder, both gazing out mysteriously. The mesmerizing effect prompted one critic to point out "the witch-like weirdness of the black kitten" and for many years, the painting solicited questions by the press. But the result was not pre-planned, as Beaux’s sister later explained, "Please make no mystery about it—it was only an idea to put the black kitten on her cousin's shoulder. Nothing deeper." Sita and Sarita eventually was donated by the artist to the collection of the Musée d'Orsay
Musée d'Orsay
The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures, furniture,...
. Another highly regarded portrait from that period is New England Woman (1895), a nearly all-white oil painting which was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts is a museum and art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was founded in 1805 and is the oldest art museum and school in the United States. The academy's museum is internationally known for its collections of 19th and 20th century American paintings,...
.
In 1895 Beaux became the first woman to have a regular teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she instructed in portrait drawing and painting for the next twenty years. That rare type of achievement by a woman prompted one local newspaper to state, "It is a legitimate source of pride to Philadelphia that one of its most cherished institutions has made this innovation." She was a popular instructor. In 1896, Beaux returned to France to see a group of her paintings presented at the Salon. Influential French critic M. Henri Rochefort commented, "I am compelled to admit, not without some chagrin, that not one of our female artists…is strong enough to compete with the lady who has given us this year the portrait of Dr. Grier. Composition, flesh, texture, sound drawing—everything is there without affectation, and without seeking for effect."
New York
By 1900 the demand for Beaux's work brought clients from Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
to Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
, prompting the artist to move to New York City; it was there she spent the winters, while summering at Green Alley, the home and studio she had built in Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gloucester is a city on Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. It is part of Massachusetts' North Shore. The population was 28,789 at the 2010 U.S. Census...
. Beaux's friendship with Richard Gilder, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine The Century, helped promote her career and he introduced her to the elite of society. Among her portraits which followed from that association are those of Georges Clemenceau
Georges Clemenceau
Georges Benjamin Clemenceau was a French statesman, physician and journalist. He served as the Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909, and again from 1917 to 1920. For nearly the final year of World War I he led France, and was one of the major voices behind the Treaty of Versailles at the...
; First Lady Edith Roosevelt
Edith Roosevelt
Edith Kermit Carow Roosevelt was the second wife of Theodore Roosevelt and served as First Lady of the United States during his presidency from 1901 to 1909.-Early life:...
and her daughter; and Admiral Sir David Beatty
David Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty
Admiral of the Fleet David Richard Beatty, 1st Earl Beatty, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO was an admiral in the Royal Navy...
. She also sketched President Teddy Roosevelt during her White House
White House
The White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
visits in 1902, during which "He sat for two hours, talking most of the time, reciting Kipling, and reading scraps of Browning
Browning
-Places:* Browning, Illinois, USA* Browning, Montana, USA* Browning, Wisconsin, USA* Browning, Missouri, USA* Browning Hill, in Brown County, Indiana; sometimes called Browning Mountain* Browning, Saskatchewan, Canada* Browning No...
." Her portraits Fanny Travis Cochran, Dorothea and Francesca, and Ernesta and her Little Brother, are fine examples of her skill in painting children; Ernesta with Nurse, one of a series of essays in luminous white, was a highly original composition, seemingly without precedent. She won the Logan Medal of the arts
Logan Medal of the arts
The Logan Medal of the Arts was an arts prize initiated in 1907 and associated with the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1917 through 1940, 270 awards were given....
at the Art Institute of Chicago
Art Institute of Chicago
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...
, and became a member of the National Academy in 1902.
Green Alley
While Beaux stuck to her portraits of the elite, American art was advancing into urban and social subject matter, led by artists such as Robert Henri
Robert Henri
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. He was a leading figure of the Ashcan School in art.- Early life :...
who espoused a totally different aesthetic, "Work with great speed..Have your energies alert, up and active. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can. There is no use delaying…Stop studying water pitchers and bananas and paint everyday life." He advised his students, among them Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
and Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and writer.- Biography :Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, the same year as fellow American artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper...
, to live with the common man and paint the common man, in total opposition to Cecilia Beaux’s artistic methods and subjects. The clash of Henri and William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase was an American painter known as an exponent of Impressionism and as a teacher. He is also responsible for establishing the Chase School, which later would become Parsons The New School for Design.- Early life and training :He was born in Williamsburg , Indiana, to the family...
(representing Beaux and the traditional art establishment) resulted in 1907 in the independent exhibition by the urban realists known as "The Eight" or the Ashcan School
Ashcan School
The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, is defined as a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the United States during the early twentieth century, best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York's poorer neighborhoods. The movement grew out of a group...
. Beaux and her art friends defended the old order, and many thought (and hoped) the new movement to be a passing fad, but it turned out to be a revolutionary turn in American art.
Corcoran Gallery of Art
The Corcoran Gallery of Art is the largest privately supported cultural institution in Washington, DC. The museum's main focus is American art. The permanent collection includes works by Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas, Thomas Gainsborough, John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, Pablo...
in Washington, D.C. in 1912. Despite her continuing production and accolades, however, Beaux was working against the current of tastes and trends in art. The famed "Armory Show" of 1913 in New York City was a landmark presentation of 1,200 paintings showcasing Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
. Beaux believed that the public, initially of mixed opinion about the "new" art, would ultimately reject it and return its favor to the Pre-Impressionists. But she was wrong; the art the traditionalists deemed "not only incompetent, but grotesque" came to dominate the 20th century.
Beaux was crippled after breaking her hip while walking in Paris in 1924. With her health impaired, her work output dwindled for the remainder of her life. That same year Beaux was asked to produce a self-portrait for the Medici collection in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. In 1930 she published an autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
, Background with Figures. Her later life was filled with honors. In 1930 she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1933 came membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which two years later organized the first major retrospective of her work. Also in 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the First Lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945. She supported the New Deal policies of her husband, distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and became an advocate for civil rights. After her husband's death in 1945, Roosevelt continued to be an international...
honored Beaux as "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world". In 1942 The National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her a gold medal for lifetime achievement.
Death and critical regard
Cecilia Beaux died at Green Alley at the age of eighty-seven, and was buried in Bala Cynwyd, PennsylvaniaBala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania
Bala Cynwyd is a community in Lower Merion Township which is located on the Main Line in southeastern Pennsylvania, bordering the western edge of Philadelphia at US Route 1 . It was originally two separate towns, Bala and Cynwyd, but is commonly treated as a single community...
. In her will she devised that a Duncan Phyfe
Duncan Phyfe
Duncan Phyfe was one of nineteenth-century America’s leading furniture makers.Born Duncan Fife near Loch Fannich, Scotland, he emigrated to Albany, New York, at age 16 and served as a cabinetmaker’s apprentice...
rosewood secretaire made for her father go to her cherished nephew Cecil Kent Drinker, a Harvard physician, whom she had painted as a young boy.
Though Beaux was an individualist, comparisons to Sargent would prove inevitable, and often favorable. Her strong technique, her perceptive reading of her subjects, and her ability to flatter without falsifying, were traits similar to his. "The critics are very enthusiastic. (Bernard) Berenson, Mrs. Coates tells me, stood in front of the portraits – Miss Beaux's three – and wagged his head. 'Ah, yes, I see!' Some Sargents. The ordinary ones are signed John Sargent, the best are signed Cecilia Beaux, which is, of course, nonsense in more ways than one, but it is part of the generous chorus of praise." Though overshadowed by Mary Cassatt
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists...
and relatively unknown to museum-goers today, Beaux's craftsmanship and extraordinary output were highly regarded in her time. While presenting the Carnegie Institute's Gold Medal to Beaux in 1899, William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase was an American painter known as an exponent of Impressionism and as a teacher. He is also responsible for establishing the Chase School, which later would become Parsons The New School for Design.- Early life and training :He was born in Williamsburg , Indiana, to the family...
stated "Miss Beaux is not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived. Miss Beaux has done away entirely with sex [gender] in art."
During her long productive life as an artist, she maintained her personal aesthetic and high standards against all distractions and countervailing forces. She constantly struggled for perfection, "A perfect technique in anything," she stated in an interview, "means that there has been no break in continuity between the conception and the act of performance." She summed up her driving work ethic, "I can say this: When I attempt anything, I have a passionate determination to overcome every obstacle…And I do my own work with a refusal to accept defeat that might almost be called painful."
External links
- Cecilia Beaux from Online Encyclopedia
- Cecilia Beaux from Smithsonian American Art Museum
- Cecilia Beaux Papers from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
- Portrait of Mrs. John Wheeler Leavitt, 1885, grandmother of Cecilia Beaux, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pa., ExplorePAHistory.com
- Aimee Ernesta and Eliza Cecilia: Two Sisters, Two Choices, Tara Leigh Tappert, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, July 2000, pp. 249–291
- Cecilia Beaux, American Figure Painter, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, February 2 - April 13, 2008
- Cecilia Beaux Letters, Special Collections, Boston Athenaeum
- Cecilia Beaux's Contemporaries Judged Her to Be the Cat's Meow; History Sees a Bit of a Chameleon, The Washington Post, March 9, 2008, washingtonpost.com
- Cecilia Beaux, Americans in Paris: 1860–1900, Americans in Paris, The Metropolitan Museum