Background

Cecilia Beaux was born on May 1, 1855, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the second of two daughters who survived infancy. Her father, Jean Adolphe Beaux, a native of Nîmes, France, and a staunch Protestant, had come to Philadelphia at the age of thirty-eight to try to establish a silk factory. Her mother, Cecilia Kent (Leavitt) Beaux, was a New Yorker of colonial New England descent who had gone to Philadelphia as a governess after her father failed in business. She died a few days after the daughter's birth, and Jean Beaux soon returned to France, leaving the two girls to be reared by their maternal grandmother and their Aunt Eliza Leavitt, a gifted musician. The family was supported by a Quaker uncle, William Biddle, and provided with a rich background in literature, music, and art.

Education

Save for two years in a Philadelphia finishing school, Beaux was educated at home by her aunt. She also received some early knowledge of art from paintings in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Gibson Collection in Philadelphia. Beaux received further professional instruction from William Sartain.

Career

To help support herself Cecilia taught art at a private school and to a few individual pupils. Miss Beaux's first important painting was a portrait of her sister and son Henry, done in 1883-1884. Exhibited the following year at the Pennsylvania Academy, it won the Mary Smith Prize, and in 1886 it was exhibited in the Paris Salon (as "Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance"), a signal honor for a beginner. These tokens of recognition encouraged her to undertake further study abroad, and early in 1888 she went to Paris, where she worked at the Académie Julian, receiving instruction from such established artists as Joseph Robert-Fleury, Benjamin Constant, Adolphe Bouguereau, Charles Lazar, Gustave Courtois, and Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret. Whether because of this diversity of example, or because of willful independence, none of these teachers exerted any appreciable influence upon her. She traveled in France, visited Italy and England, and after nearly two years returned to the United States to begin in earnest her successful career, at first in Philadelphia and then, from 1900, in New York City.

Her work brought her numerous honors, many of them made the more impressive by their being accorded a woman. She received, in all, four Smith prizes from the Pennsylvania Academy, which also gave her a Gold Medal of Honor (1898) and the Temple Gold Medal (1900). In 1893 she was elected a member of the Society of American Artists and received a gold medal from the Philadelphia Art Club and the Dodge Prize of the National Academy of Design, which made her an Associate in 1894 and an Academician in 1902. She received gold medals also from the Carnegie Institute (1899), the Paris Exposition (1900), the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo (1901), the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (1904), the National Academy (1913), the Art Institute of Chicago (1921), and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1926); she was elected a member of the American Academy in 1933. She received honorary degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (1908) and Yale (1912).

Perhaps the crest of her career came when six of her portraits were accepted by the 1896 Paris Salon, which did her the further honor of hanging them as a group. In this year she was also made an Associée of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. As these honors suggest, she was highly esteemed by her colleagues, and was a much sought-after portraitist. Among her famous sitters were Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and her daughter Ethel (1901 - 1902) and, after World War I, Cardinal Mercier of Belgium, Premier Clemenceau of France, and the British admiral David Beatty (all in the National Collection of Fine Arts, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C. ).

Cecilia Beaux's painting style has the breadth and fluency--but not quite the same brilliance--as that of her acquaintance and contemporary, John Singer Sargent. It gives the appearance of rapidity, though in fact she was a slow worker. In a talk delivered at Simmons College in 1907, she described her purpose as the achievement of an "abstraction of reality" through the elimination of inessentials. She disapproved of portraiture that was merely "reproductive, " believing that "imaginative insight" and "design" were the fundamental ingredients of a successful portrait. There is a sameness and repetitiousness in Beaux's mature art which is its major defect, although a virtue and necessity in a successful portrait painter.

On the whole, Beaux’s most pleasing pictures are informal ones of her family and friends, such as "Man with a Cat" or "At Home" (1902), of her brother-in-law Henry Sturgis Drinker; "Child with Nurse" (1894) and "Ernesta" (1914), portraying her niece Ernesta Drinker; "Richard Watson Gilder" (1902 - 03), "The Dancing Lesson" (1899-1900), "After the Meeting" (1914), paintings of Gilder's daughters. During a visit to Paris in the summer of 1924 Beaux fell and broke her hip. The accident left her a semi-invalid, and she did little more painting. She died in 1942 of a coronary thrombosis at "Green Alley, " her summer home at Gloucester, Massachussets, at the age of eighty-seven. Burial was in Philadelphia's West Laurel Hill Cemetery.

Achievements

• Cecilia Beaux became famous through her works: Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and her daughter Ethel; Cardinal Mercier of Belgium; Premier Clemenceau of France; the British admiral David Beatty; Henry Sturgis Drinker; Ernesta Drinker; "Man with a Cat"; "Child with Nurse"; "Ernesta"; "Richard Watson Gilder"; "The Dancing Lesson"; "After the Meeting" (1914), etc.

Works

More photos

• book

  • 92 Color Paintings of Cecilia Beaux - American Society Portraitist (May 1, 1855 - September 7, 1942)

    (Cecilia Beaux book includes 92 high quality reproductions...)

Membership

Cecilia Beaux was a member of the Society of American Artists; the American Academy. She was an Associée of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• In 1910 Cecilia's friend Leila Mechlin wrote, "Miss Beaux is one of those painters who seem to have arrived almost abruptly on a plane of exceptional accomplishment beyond which comparatively little advance is made except in matters of facility. "

Interests

• Artists

  In her autobiography Cecilia wrote that she felt "almost holy ecstasy" at the sight of a head by the popular French painter Thomas Couture, "vividly remembered" a Gustave Courbet tree, was "thrilled" by the dashing manner of the Italian portraitist Giovanni Boldini, and found the equally brilliant style of the Spaniard Carbo Fortuny "magical. " It was to the work of these last two that her own later showed considerable affinity.
  
  She admired Philadelphia's greatest painter of that period, Thomas Eakins, and would have studied with him at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but for her Uncle Will, who opposed the life class and its "rabble of untidy art students"; she afterward thought it perhaps fortunate that she had not been exposed to Eakins's overpowering influence.

Connections

Cecilia Beaux never married.

Father:

Jean Adolphe Beaux

Mother:

Cecilia Kent (Leavitt) Beaux

Sister:

Alice Zephrine Beaux

Sister:

Aimee Ernesta (Beaux) Drinker

Cousin:

Catharine Drinker

aunt:

Eliza Leavitt

He was a gifted musician.

Uncle:

William Biddle

Friend:

Leila Mechlin

References

• Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter
• Cecilia Beaux: A Modern Painter in the Gilded Age
• Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture