History in the Margins

Cecilia Beaux. Self-portrait. 1924

During her lifetime, Cecelia Beaux (1855-1942) was well-known in the social circles who had their portraits painted. She was often compared to John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), whose career overlapped with Beaux’s— both for her style and for her place as one of the leading society portrait painters of her day.[1] Both blended academic realism with impressionism to create works that combined technical mastery with psychological depth. Today Sargent is an art history rock star; Beaux is obscure at best.[2]

Beaux was born and raised in Philadelphia, which was a center of art education in the United States. At the age of sixteen, she took her first formal art lessons with Catherine Ann Drinker, who was a successful artist in her own right. Starting in 1875, she studied for three years at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts,[3]

Over the next few years, Beaux found various ways of making a living as an artist. She was an art instructor at a girl’s school. She gave private lessons. She worked as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for a multi-volume volume report by the U.S. Geological Survey under the auspices of scientist Edward Drinker Cope[4], but she found that the patience and accuracy required to do such work gave her a pain in her “solar plexus.”[5] She even worked for a time at painting porcelain, an accepted way for middle class women to make a living. She later described that period as “the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art…I remember it with gloom and record it with shame."

In 1884, Beaux set out to proved herself as a serious artist.  She entered a large painting of her sister and infant nephew, titled Les Derniers Jours d’Enfance in the Pennsylvania Academy’s annual exhibition.  It won the prize for the best painting by a female artist. [Sigh] Her days of painting porcelain were over. Over the next three years, she received more than 50 commissions from notable Philadelphians, earning fees equal to those charged by Thomas Eakins, a founder of the Ashcan School and an acclaimed portraitist , who was then an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Equally important, at the urging of a friend, she sent Les Derniers to Paris, where it appeared in the Paris Salon of 1887, a professional turning point for any American painter of the period.[6]

Despite her success in Philadelphia, Beaux decided she needed more advanced training. In 1888, like hundreds of other American artists at the time, she went to Paris to study.[7] She studied for two years at the Académie Julian, a famous private art school that was established as an alternative to the official École des Beaux-Arts, which did not admit women as students at the time.[8] When the academy closed for the summer, she went to a seaside town in Brittany, where she experimented with the en plein air techniques developed by the Impressionists.

When Beaux returned in the United States, her portraits were even more highly sought after.. She became the first woman faculty member at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she taught portrait painting and drawing for twenty years. Her works appeared in important exhibitions, including the Women’s Building at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She had solo exhibitions at major galleries. A group of her paintings appeared at the Paris Salon in 1896.

By 1900, the demand for Beaux’s paintings had spread beyond Philadelphia, inspiring her to spend winters in New York and summers in a home and studio that she built in Gloucester, Massachusetts. During this period she painted portraits of successful professional women and social elites, including First Lady Edith Roosevelt.

At the end of World War I, Beaux traveled to Europe as an official portrait painter for the United States War Portraits Commission. Her assignment was to paint portraits of three European war heroes: Cardinal Mercier of Belgium, Admiral Sir David Beatty of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau of France. (She had to paint her portrait of Clemenceau from a single sketch. The premier hated having his portrait painted and only gave her one sitting.)

In 1924, the Uffizi gallery in Florence invited her to contribute a self-portrait for the Medici collection. That same year she broke her hip while walking in Paris. Although she continued to paint, the injury meant she was less prolific.

By the time she died in 1942 at the age of 87, the achievements of her long and fertile career were almost forgotten.

[1] At one exhibition, art connoisseur Bernard Berenson joked that her paintings were the best Sargents in the room.

[2] I find it hard to describe a painter as forgotten who has work hanging in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

[3] An institution that has been popping up in my reading a lot lately. Founded in 1805, it was the first art school in the United States.

[4] Best known as one of the protagonist in the fossil hunting competition known as the Bone Wars, a story for another day.

[5] I can sympathize. I feel the same way about interviewing people. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean it’s the right job for you.

[6]Art historian Lois Marie Fink, writing about the Salons,  described the exhibitions as the equivalent of the Oscars for artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

[7] According to the American Register, a paper for and about American expatriates in Paris, there were more than 800 women art students in Paris that year.

[8] Just because Julian admitted women as students didn’t mean they got the same education as their male counterparts. They paid double the tuition, but worked in segregated studios so that they weren’t exposed to male nudes in figures study classes. And since they were in separate studios, they received less instruction than their male peers. Proving once again that separate is seldom equal.

Beaux recognized the inequities and wrote home “I want these men…to know me and recognize that I can do something.”