Cecilia Beaux

Beaux, Cecilia (1 May 1855-17 Sept. 1942), portrait painter, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Jean Adolphe Beaux, a French émigré and silk manufacturer, and Cecilia Kent Leavitt, a governess and teacher from New York City. She was baptized Eliza Cecilia Beaux. Twelve days after her birth, Beaux's mother died from childbirth complications; her father then gave her and her sister to their maternal grandmother and aunts to raise. The Leavitt family's tenuous financial circumstances, ever present during Beaux's childhood, were eased when her aunt Emily married mining engineer William Foster Biddle and he joined the household.

Educated at home until age fourteen, Beaux attended the Misses Lyman's School for two years and then began her art training. In 1871 William Biddle arranged private art instruction for her with artist and distant relative Catharine Ann Drinker (who later became Catharine Janvier). For a year Beaux did copy work with Drinker and then completed two years of more formal art training at the short-lived art school of Francis Adolf Van Der Wielen, a Dutch artist who had emigrated to Philadelphia.

Adopting her mother's name--Cecilia Beaux--as her artistic signature, Beaux began her career in the decorative arts. In 1873 she taught art classes at Miss Sanford's School and within a year was giving private art lessons to a number of individual students. She soon expanded her efforts to commercial endeavors, making a lithograph entitled The Brighton Cats (1874; private collection). Its success probably brought her earliest lucrative commission executing lithographic drawings of fossils for the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, who was then doing work for the U.S. Geological Survey. Following a month of china-painting lessons in 1879 with French ceramist Camille Piton, Beaux began creating portraits of children on china plates. She also produced crayon, watercolor, and charcoal portraits based on photographs. Beaux's interest in portraiture developed from her experiences in the design arts.

To enhance her skills Beaux sporadically attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1876 to 1878 but refused to study with Thomas Eakins, working instead in the school's antique, portrait, and costume classes. She continued her art training in the early 1880s in a private class, to which the artist William Sartain infrequently came to give criticism. It was under Sartain's tutelage that Beaux learned to paint, producing her first major portrait, The Last Days of Infancy (1883-1884; Pennsylvania Academy), for which she was awarded the Pennsylvania Academy's Mary Smith Prize in 1885. In 1888 Beaux went to Paris for a year and a half and received her final art instruction at the Académie Julian and Académie Colorossi, where her work was critiqued by Tony Robert Fleury, Adolphe-William Bouguereau, Gustave Courtois, P. A. J. Dagnan-Bouveret, and Benjamin Constant. During the summer of 1888, while painting in the Breton village of Concarneau with artists Thomas Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar, Beaux's ambition to become a portrait painter solidified.

Beaux's painting career spanned the great age and last stage of the formal society portrait in America, and when she returned to Philadelphia in 1889 she established her reputation with beautiful grand manner paintings of her sister's children, such as Cecil (1892; Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Ernesta with Nurse (1894; Metropolitan Museum of Art), and with exquisite commissioned portraits of Philadelphia's elite, such as Mrs. Beauveau Borie and Son Adolph (1896; Amon Carter Museum) and Mrs. Clement A. Griscom and Daughter Frances (1898; Pennsylvania Academy). Beaux's standing in the Philadelphia art world was acknowledged in 1895, when she was hired by the Pennsylvania Academy to teach the school's portrait classes; she was the first woman to teach there full time and remained on the faculty until 1916.

In 1896 Beaux sent a group of paintings, including The Dreamer (1894; Butler Institute of American Art) and Sita and Sarita (1894; Musée d'Orsay), to the Parisian Salon at the Champs de Mars. Acclaimed by the critics, Beaux was made an associate of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts; her artistic reputation escalated to an international level; and William Merritt Chase soon declared her "the best woman painter who ever lived." Beaux continued exhibiting her work in annual exhibitions and international expositions, where she frequently won awards and prizes, including the Pennsylvania Academy's Gold Medal of Honor (1898), the Carnegie Institute's gold medal (1899), and the gold medal (1900) at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.

By 1899 Beaux had moved from Philadelphia to New York City, and by 1905 she was regularly spending summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she had built "Green Alley," her summer home and studio. As one of America's most esteemed portrait painters, Beaux was now fulfilling commissions for numerous luminaries. These commissioned works include Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Daughter Ethel (1902; private collection); A. Piatt Andrew (1902-1903; Cape Ann Historical Association), for the Harvard economist and U.S. congressman; Richard Watson Gilder (1903; private collection), for the Century Magazine editor; and Caroline Hazard (1908; Wellesley College) for Wellesley College. In 1919, at the close of the First World War, the U.S. War Portraits Commission assigned Beaux her final important portrait commission, for which she produced Cardinal Desire Joseph Mercier, Premier Georges Clemenceau, and Admiral Sir David Beatty (all Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Art).

From 1918 to 1928 Beaux gave criticism in a private art class in New York, but when she broke her hip on the streets of Paris in 1924 her painting career ended. Crippled for the rest of her life, Beaux turned her energies to writing her autobiography, Background with Figures (1930). During the 1930s Beaux was honored for her contribution to the arts. The National Institute of Arts and Letters elected her to membership in 1930; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1933. She was also awarded the National Achievement Gold Medal from the Chi Omega Fraternity in 1933. Given to "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world," the medal was presented to her by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1935 the American Academy of Arts and Letters organized the first retrospective of her work, and in 1942 they awarded her a gold medal for lifetime achievement.

Beaux never married, believing that her art career was a "sacred calling" given to her as one of the few artistically gifted women willing to sacrifice marriage and family for the rewards of artistic success at the highest levels. Beaux's portraits, filled with bravura brushwork and enticing color notes, flatteringly chronicled the lives of America's upper class and were often favorably compared to the work of John Singer Sargent. Beaux died at Green Alley and was buried in the West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala-Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Bibliography

Beaux's papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; the Archives of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; and the Archives of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. There is also substantial information on Beaux in the Gilder/Palmer Family Papers in Tyringham, Mass.; and the George Dudley Seymour Papers in the Yale University Library. In addition to her autobiography, Beaux wrote a number of articles on art education, including "Why the Girl Art Student Fails," Harper's Bazar, May 1913; "Professional Art Schools," Art and Progress, Nov. 1915; and "What Should the College A.B. Course Offer to the Future Artist?" American Magazine of Art, Oct. 1916. Important sources on Beaux's life are Thornton Oakley, Cecilia Beaux (1943); Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Paintings and Drawings of Cecilia Beaux (1955); Catherine Drinker Bowen, Family Portrait (1970); an exhibition catalog by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Cecilia Beaux: Portrait of an Artist (1974); and Tara Leigh Tappert, Choices: The Life and Career of Cecilia Beaux--A Professional Biography (1990). Beaux was also the subject of numerous articles during her lifetime, including William Walton, "Cecilia Beaux," Scribner's, Oct. 1897, pp. 477-85; Mrs. Arthur Bell, "The Work of Cecilia Beaux," International Studio, Oct. 1899, pp. 215-22; Hildegarde Hawthorne, "A Garden of the Heart--Green Alley, the Home of Miss Cecilia Beaux," Century Magazine, Aug. 1910, pp. 581-87; Gutzon Borglum, "Cecilia Beaux--Painter of Heroes," Delineator, June 1921, pp. 16-17; and Allison Gray, "The Extraordinary Career of Cecilia Beaux," American Magazine, Oct. 1923, pp. 61-63, 195-98. Contemporary reassessments include Elizabeth Graham Bailey, "The Cecilia Beaux Papers," Archives of American Art Journal 13, no. 4 (1973): 14-19; Judith E. Stein, "Profile of Cecilia Beaux," Feminist Art Journal 4 (Winter 1975-1976): 25-31, 33; Tappert, "Cecilia Beaux: A Career As a Portraitist," Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 4 (1988): 389-411; and Sarah Burns, "The 'Earnest, Untiring Worker' and the Magician of the Brush: Gender Politics in the Criticism of Cecilia Beaux," Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 1 (1992): 36-53. An obituary is in the New York Herald Tribune, 18 Sept. 1942.

Tara Leigh Tappert

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