Cecilia Beaux
(United States of America, 01/05/1855 - 17/09/1942)
Born in Philadelphia in 1855, Beaux’s mother died just eight days after her birth and, overwhelmed and incapable of raising the children alone, her father soon returned to his native France and abandoned his young children to the care of their grandmother and aunts. Here, Beaux was encouraged to pursue her artistic interests.
At the age of 16, she began taking classes with artist and author Catherine Ann Drinker and, a year later, studied perspective and drawing from casts with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen. At a time when women were still barred from attending classes with life models, plaster casts were pivotal to artistic development.
In 1876, Beaux began attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where she avoided the more progressive features of the school, such as women attending segregated life drawing classes, instead, focusing on the much more traditional portrait painting. Here, she found great success and went on to win the Mary Smith Prize four times between 1885 and 1892.
Despite her family’s objections, Beaux moved to Paris at the age of 32 and quickly enrolled in classes at the Académie Julian and the Académie Colarossi. Her exposure to French academic practice strengthened the disciplined draughtsmanship already characteristic of her work, but arriving in the city as its avant-garde revolution was well underway broadening her understanding of contemporary portraiture and led to the adoption on a lighter and whiter colour palette in her oil paintings.
Returning to Philadelphia in 1889, she possessed both the technical credentials and cosmopolitan outlook necessary to establish herself as a serious professional artist and began painting idealised portraits in a classical style. During this time, Beaux transformed portraiture into the principal vehicle of her artistic and professional identity. Her Philadelphia studio attracted commissions from members of the region’s cultural and social elite, while portraits of friends and relatives provided a more experimental area in which she could explore gesture, tonal relationships, unconventional poses and psychological ambiguity.
Works such as Sita and Sarita (1886) reveal the breadth of this inquiry. The painting’s carefully controlled design, stark tonal contrasts, and enigmatic relationship between sitter and animal demonstrate that Beaux’s portraiture could operate simultaneously as likeness, character study, and formal experiment. The original was eventually acquired by the French state and entered the Musée du Luxembourg before passing to the Musée d’Orsay, and Beaux later produced a second version for herself.
Her professional prominence was accompanied by significant institutional recognition. Beaux became a member of the Society of American Artists and, in 1895, joined the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as its first full-time female instructor, teaching portrait drawing and painting until 1915. Her achievements placed her within the established structures of American art rather than outside them, eventually leading her to paint the portraits of Georges Clemenceau, Edith Roosevelt, then-President Theodore Roosevelt and Cardinal Mercier.
Becoming an official portraitist for the United States War Portraits Commission, she travelled to Europe in 1919 until a broken hip, sustained in Paris in 1924, curtailed her painting. Nevertheless, she remained intellectually active, painting a self-portrait commissioned by the Uffizi Gallery in Florence that same year and publishing her autobiography, Background with Figures, in 1930.
Image: Cecilia Beaux, Sita and Sarita (1886). Oil on canvas, 94 x 63.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, U.S.A.
