Cecilia Beaux

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Cecilia Beaux (May 1, 1855 – September 17, 1942) was an American society portraitist in the manner of John Singer Sargent.

She was a near-contemporary of American artist Mary Cassatt and she continued her studies in Philadelphia and France.

Her sympathetic portraits of the American ruling class made her one of the most influential portrait painters of her time.

Early life

Eliza Cecilia Beaux was born in Philadelphia on May 1, 1855, the younger daughter of French silk manufacturer Jean Adolphe Beaux and teacher Cecilia Kent Leavitt. She was the mother of renowned businessman John Wheeler Leavitt of New York City and his partner, Cecilia Kent of Suffield, Connecticut. Cecilia Kent Leavitt died of puerperal fever 12 days after giving birth to her first child at the age of 33.

Cecilia and her sister Etta were then raised by their maternal grandmother and aunts, mainly in Philadelphia. Her father, who was unable to cope with the loss of his son and feeling stranded in a foreign country, returned to France for 16 years, with only one visit back to Philadelphia. He returned when Cecilia was two years old, but four years later, his company was bankrupt. "We didn't love Papa very much because he was so foreign," she admitted later. We found him strange. Her father had a natural gift for drawing, and the sisters were charmed by his whimsical drawings of animals. Beaux will find that her French roots would help her during her pilgrimage and French training.

Beaux' aunt Emily married mining engineer William Foster Biddle, who Beaux would later refer to as "after my grandmother, the most influential and beneficent presence in my life." He was concerned for his nieces-in-law for fifty years, with consistent care and occasional financial assistance. On the other hand, her grandmother, on the other hand, gave day-to-day oversight and kindly discipline. Grandma Leavitt provided a concrete framework, stressing that "everything undertaken must be accomplished, conquered." The Civil War years were particularly difficult, but the extended family survived despite Beaux's father's lack of emotional or financial assistance.

Beaux began to spend some time in the lives of "Willie" and Emily, two very talented musicians, following the war. Beaux learned to play the piano but preferred singing. The musical atmosphere of later years gave her a leg up on her artistic aspirations. "They knew precisely the spirit and needs of an artist's life," Beaux described. She had her first real exposure to art when visiting Willie's nearby Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of America's finest art schools and museums, in her early teens. Although fascinated by some of the pictures' narratives, particularly the Biblical interpretations of Benjamin West's massive paintings, Beaux had no intention of becoming an artist at this time.

Her childhood was a sheltered, but generally positive one. She already demonstrated the characteristics of "both a realist and a perfectionist, accompanied by an uncompromising passion for pushing forward." She attended Misses Lyman School and was just an average student, but she did well in French and Natural History. However, she was unable to afford the extra fee for art lessons.

Beaux began art lessons with Catherine Ann Drinker, a well-known artist who had her own studio and a growing clientele at age 16. Beaux' role model began with alcohol, and she continued to study Drinker for a year. During the time when the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction, she studied for two years with painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who taught lessons in perspective and drawing from casts. Female students were refused direct anatomy study in anatomy and were often prostitutes) until a decade later.

Beaux took over Miss Sanford's School's Beaux's position at 18, taking over Beaux' position. She also gave private art lessons and created decorative art and small portraits. Her own research had mainly been self-directed. Beaux was the first woman to lithography for Philadelphia printer Thomas Sinclair, and she published her first work in St. Nicholas magazine in December 1873. For a multi-volume report sponsored by the US Geological Survey, Beaux demonstrated precision and patience by drawing fossils for Edward Drinker Cope. However, she did not find scientific illustration suitable for a career (the extreme exactitude required gave her pains in the "solar plexus"). She didn't even consider herself an artist at this point.

Beaux first attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1876, then under Thomas Eakins' dynamism, his monumental work The Gross Clinic had "horrified Philadelphia Exhibition-goers as a gory spectacle" at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876. She steered clear of the tumultuous Eakins, though she admired his work. His progressive teaching philosophy, which primarily concentrated on anatomy and live examination (and encouraged the female students to partake in segregated studios), culminated in his resignation as director of the Academy. She did not ally herself with Eakins' ardent student backers, and later wrote, "A curious sense of self-preservation kept me outside the magical circle." Rather, she took costume and portrait painting lessons with ailing director Christian Schussele. In 1885, 1887, 1891, and 1892, Beaux received the Mary Smith Award at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibitions.

After leaving the academy, the 24-year-old Beaux decided to try her hand at porcelain painting, enrolling in a course at the National Art Training School. She was well suited to the precise work, but "this was the lowest depth I ever achieved in commercial art," she later stated, "and although it was a time when youth and passion were in their first attendance on me, I still remember it with gloom and record it with shame." Starting in 1881, she worked privately with William Sartain, a friend of Eakins and a New York artist who was invited to Philadelphia to teach a group of art students. Despite Beaux's admiration for Eakins and thought his painting skills were superior to Sartain's, she preferred the latter's soft teaching style, which promoted no particular aesthetic approach. Sartain, on the other hand, believed in phrenology and Beaux, a lifelong belief that physical appearance related to habits and characteristics.

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. Beaux began to demonstrate her artistic abilities after the company was disbanded. Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance, a portrait of her sister and nephew whose composition and style revealed a debt to James McNeill Whistler, who owed a debt to him and whose subject matter was similar to Mary Cassatt's mother-and-child paintings. It was awarded a prize for the best painting by a female artist at the Academy of Art, as well as shows in Philadelphia and New York. She produced more than 50 portraits in the next three years with the zeal of a dedicated professional artist, which culminated in that seminal painting. Her acceptance among her peers confirmed her appointment to serve as a juror on the academy's hanging committee. She was drawing commissions from prominent Philadelphians and earning $500 per portrait in the mid-1880s, much like what Eakins commanded. Beaux relented and sent the painting abroad in the care of her friend, who was able to bring the painting to the museum when Margaret Bush-Brown argued that Les Derniers was fine enough to be on display at the famed Paris Salon.

Beaux, a 32-year-old girl with a strong reputation in Philadelphia, decided that she still had to develop her skills. She and her cousin May Whitlock are headed for Paris with the intention of overcoming her family's objections. She studied at the Académie Julian, Paris's best art academy, as well as at Académie Colarossi, where she was given weekly critiques by established masters such as Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau. "Fleury is much less predictable than Bouguereau, and don't temper his severities," she said, but the best thing of all is that "we will do everything we can to help you." Though Beaux was advised regularly of Beaux's growth overseas and to "not be concerned with any indiscretions of our children," her Aunt Eliza has pleaded for her niece to avoid the temptations of Paris.

The Impressionists, a group of artists who had started their own series of independent exhibitions from the official Salon in 1874, were beginning to lose their sympathy when Beaux arrived in Paris. "Independence" or "Intransigents" (which also included Degas, Monet, Sisley, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot, the group that at times included Degas, Monet, Sisley, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot) had been suffering the wrath of the critics for many years. Their art, although varying in style and technique, was the antithesis of the Academic art in which Beaux was educated and of which her tutor William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a leading master. Beaux worked in the fishing village of Concarneau with American painters Alexander Harrison and Charles Lazar in the summer of 1888, with classes in summer recess. She tried applying plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with no success. Beaux, unlike her predecessor Mary Cassatt, who had been around the start of the Impressionist movement 15 years ago and who had adopted it, was not consistent and true to observation, and she maintained her identity as Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso continued to explore painting in new directions. Beaux adored classic artists like Titian and Rembrandt. She did influence her palette, but she changed her hue in her oil painting, especially in depicting female figures, a style that was also popular by Sargent.

Beaux returned to painting portraits in the grand fashion in 1889, including her sister's relatives as well as Philadelphia's elite. She also thought it was best not to marry, and in selecting a male company, she selected men who did not want to delay her career. She and her family returned to life with her children, and they all approved of her decision and demanding that her little be handled with household chores. She created a standardized, professional routine, and she aspired the same from her models.

The five years that followed were prolific, resulting in over forty portraits. She exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1890, winning the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club in 1893 and the Dodge Award at the New York National Academy of Design. At the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois, she exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Women's Building. The Reverend Matthew Blackburne Grier's portrait was particularly well-received, as was Sita and Sarita, a portrait of her cousin Charles W. Leavitt's wife Sarah (Allibone) Leavitt's wife Sarah (Allibone) Leavitt's wife Sarah (Allibone) Leavitt in white with a small black cat perched on her shoulder, all gazed out mysteriously. One commentator was prompted to point out "the mysterious strangeness of the black kitten," and for many years, the painting solicited questions by the press. However, the result was not planned, as Beaux' sister later explained, "Please make no mystery about it"; it was only an attempt to place the black kitten on her cousin's shoulder." Nothing deeper." Beaux donated Sita and Sarita to the Musée du Luxembourg, but only after making a copy for herself. New England Woman (1895), a nearly all-white oil painting bought by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is another popular portrait from that time.

Beaux, 1895, was the first woman to have a regular teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she taught portrait drawing and painting for the next 20 years. "It is a legitimate source of pride to Philadelphia that one of the city's most cherished organizations has made this advancement," one local newspaper states. She was a well-known instructor. Beaux returned to France in 1896 to see a collection of her paintings on view at the Salon. "I am obliged to confess, not without some chagrin," M. Henri Rochefort, a prominent French critic, said, that not one of our female artists, "is strong enough to contend with the woman who has gifted us the portrait of Dr. Grier this year. Everything is present without emotion, including without asking for effect": composition, flesh, texture, and sound drawing.

Cecilia Beaux characterized herself as a "New Woman," a 19th-century woman who explored educational and career choices that had traditionally been unobtainable to women. The Reason Dinner was Late, by Charles Dana Gibson, who depicted a youthful woman's artistic aspiration in her drawing, The Reason Dinner was Late is a late nineteenth century crime novel that portrays a visiting policeman. This "New Woman" was a hit, well-prepared, and did not marry often; Ellen Day Hale, Mary Cassatt, Elizabeth Nourse, and Elizabeth Coffin were among Ellen Day Hale's such women.

Beaux was a member of The Plastic Club of Philadelphia. Elenore Abbott, Jessie Willcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Emily Sartain, and Elizabeth Shippen Green were among the others. Many of the women who founded the group had been Howard Pyle's students. It was established to encourage one another academically and increase sales of their works of art.

Beaux's work brought clients from Washington, D.C., to Boston, prompting the artist to move to New York City in the winters; it was there she spent the winters while summering at Green Alley, the artist's home and studio built in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Beaux's friendship with Richard Gilder, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine The Century, was a catalyst in her rise and introduced her to the rest of society. Those of Georges Clemenceau's portraits; First Lady Edith Roosevelt and her daughter; and Admiral Sir David Beatty are among her portraits that followed. During her White House visits in 1902, she sketched President Teddy Roosevelt, who sat for two hours, reciting Kipling, and reading Browning scraps. Beaux became very close with Gilder's daughter Dorothea, and the two women exchanged affectionate letters for many years. Fanny Travis Cochran, Dorothea and Francesca, along with Ernesta and her Little Brother, are fine examples of her painting talents; Ernesta with Nurse, one of a series of essays in luminous white, was a striking work of art; her portraits, especially in a historical setting, were a fine example of her exceptional work. She was a member of the National Academy of Design in 1902 and 1921 she received the Logan Medal of the Arts at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Beaux began living in Green Alley year after year, in a thriving colony of "cottages" belonged to her wealthy friends and neighbors. Both three aunts died, and she needed a mental break from Philadelphia and New York. She managed to find new portraiture, eating in the mornings, and enjoying a leisurely life the rest of the time. She deliberately monitored her energy and her daily routines in order to achieve a high rate of success, and believed this was a determining factor in her triumph. "Strength is the stumbling block" explains why so few women achieved as well as she did. They (women) are often unable to withstand the strenuous work of it day in and day out. They are old and can't refuel themselves."

While Beaux stayed true to her portraits of the wealthy, American art was transforming into urban and social concern, led by artists like Robert Henri, who espoused a completely different style. "Work with great energy." If you can, do it all in a single sitting. If you can, you will finish in a minute. There is no point delaying...Stop worrying about water pitchers and bananas...All day life is about painting." In complete opposition to Cecilia Beaux's artistic approaches and subjects, he advised his students, among them Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent, to live with the common man and paint the common man. In 1907, Henri and William Merritt Chase (representing Beaux and the traditional art establishment) met in the Ashcan School's independent exhibition. Beaux and her art allies defended the old order, and many believed (and wished) that the new movement would be a passing fad, but it did not turn out to be a revolutionary change in American art.

In 1910, her beloved Uncle Willie died. Beaux was still very profitable after being devastated by the tragedy at 55 years old. She created almost 25% of her lifetime artwork in the next five years and gained a steady stream of awards. In 1912, she had a major exhibition of 35 paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Beaux, despite her continuing production and awards, was still struggling with the emerging of tastes and fashions in art. The 1913 "Armory Show" in New York City was a monumental exhibition of 1,200 paintings showcasing Modernism. Beaux predicted that the general public, who had a mixed opinion of the "new" art, would eventually condemn it and return its pre-Impressionist preference to the Pre-Impressionists.

Beaux was crippled after breaking her hip while walking in Paris in 1924. With her health deteriorating, her work output dwindled for the remainder of her life. Beaux was asked to produce a self-portrait for the Medici collection in Florence's Uffizi Gallery that year. Background with Figures, an autobiography published in 1930. Her later life was full of accolades. In 1930, she was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1933, she joined the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which two years later organized the first major retrospective of her work. Eleanor Roosevelt named Beaux as "the American woman who made the greatest contribution to the world's culture." The National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her a gold medal for lifetime achievement in 1942.

Cecilia Beaux died in Gloucester, Massachusetts, at the age of 87. She was buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. In her will, she left a Duncan Phyfe rosewood secretaire made for her father's adored nephew Cecil Kent Drinker, a Harvard physician who had painted as a young child.

Beaux was included in the 2018 exhibit Women in Paris 1850-1900 at the Clark Art Institute.

Although Beaux was an individualist, comparisons to Sargent would be inevitable and often beneficial. Her strong technique, her keen reading of her subjects, and her ability to flatter without falsifying were all traits similar to his. "The narrator is ecstatic." Mrs. Berenson, Mrs. Coates, walked in front of the portraits – Miss Beaux's three – and waggled his head, as he leaned his head.

'Ah, yes, I see!'

Sargents are among the Sargents rescued on the Web. The ordinary ones are signed John Sargent, but the best are signed Cecilia Beaux, which is, of course, nonsense in more ways than one, but it is part of a generous chorus of praise." Despite being overshadowed by Mary Cassatt's presence and relatively unknown to museum-goers today, Beaux's craftsmanship and unique results were highly regarded in her day. "Miss Beaux is not only the best living woman painter, but also the best that has ever lived," William Merritt Chase said when presenting the Carnegie Institute's Gold Medal to Beaux in 1899. Miss Beaux has discarded entirely with the word "gender" in art.

She kept her personal style and high expectations against all distractions and countervailing forces throughout her long career as an artist. "A superb method in everything," she said in a chat, "means that there has been no discontinuity between the conception and the act of performance." "I can say this," she summed up her motivational work ethic: "I can say this: I have a zealous determination to tackle every obstacle...I can do my own work with a refusal to admit defeat that might almost be termed painful."

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