in
Philadelphia Beaux was born on May 1, 1855, in
Philadelphia, the younger daughter of French
silk manufacturer Jean Adolphe Beaux and teacher Cecilia Kent Leavitt. Her mother was the daughter of prominent businessman
John Wheeler Leavitt of New York City and his wife, Cecilia Kent of
Suffield, Connecticut. Cecilia Kent Leavitt died from
puerperal fever 12 days after giving birth at age 33. Cecilia and her sister Etta were subsequently raised by their maternal grandmother and aunts, primarily in Philadelphia. Her grandmother, on the other hand, provided day-to-day supervision and kindly discipline. Whether with housework, handiwork, or academics, Grandma Leavitt offered a pragmatic framework, stressing that "everything undertaken must be completed, conquered." The
Civil War years were particularly challenging, but the extended family survived despite little emotional or financial support from Beaux's father. After the war, Beaux began to spend some time in the household of "Willie" and Emily, both proficient musicians. Beaux learned to play the piano but preferred singing. The musical atmosphere later proved an advantage for her artistic ambitions. Beaux recalled, "They understood perfectly the spirit and necessities of an artist's life." In her early teens, she had her first major exposure to art during visits with Willie to the nearby
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of America's foremost art schools and museums. Though fascinated by the narrative elements of some of the pictures, particularly the Biblical themes of the massive paintings of
Benjamin West, at this point Beaux had no aspirations of becoming an artist. Her childhood was a sheltered though generally happy one. As a teen she already manifested the traits, as she described, of "both a realist and a perfectionist, pursued by an uncompromising passion for carrying through." She attended the Misses Lyman School and was just an average student, though she did well in French and Natural History. However, she was unable to afford the extra fee for art lessons. At age 16, Beaux began art lessons with a relative,
Catherine Ann Drinker, an accomplished artist who had her own studio and a growing clientele. Drinker became Beaux's role model, and she continued lessons with Drinker for a year. She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction. Given the bias of the
Victorian age, female students were denied direct study in anatomy and could not attend drawing classes with live models (who were often prostitutes) until a decade later. At 18, Beaux was appointed as a drawing teacher at Miss Sanford's School, taking over Drinker's post. She also gave private art lessons and produced decorative art and small portraits. Her own studies were mostly self-directed. Beaux received her first introduction to
lithography doing copy work for Philadelphia printer Thomas Sinclair and she published her first work in
St. Nicholas magazine in December 1873. Beaux demonstrated accuracy and patience as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for
Edward Drinker Cope, for a multi-volume report sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey. However, she did not find technical illustration suitable for a career (the extreme exactitude required gave her pains in the "solar plexus"). At this stage, she did not yet consider herself an artist. Beaux began attending the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in
Philadelphia in 1876, then under the dynamic influence of
Thomas Eakins, whose work
The Gross Clinic had "horrified Philadelphia Exhibition-goers as a gory spectacle" at the
Centennial Exhibition of 1876. She steered clear of the controversial Eakins, though she much admired his work. His progressive teaching philosophy, focused on anatomy and live study and allowed the female students to partake in segregated studios, eventually led to his firing as director of the academy. She did not ally herself with Eakins' ardent student supporters, and later wrote, "A curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle." Instead, she attended costume and portrait painting classes for three years taught by the ailing director
Christian Schussele. Beaux won the
Mary Smith Prize at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibitions in 1885, 1887, 1891, and 1892. After leaving the academy, the 24-year-old Beaux decided to try her hand at
porcelain painting and she enrolled in a course at the National Art Training School. She was well suited to the precise work but later wrote, "this was the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art, and although it was a period when youth and romance were in their first attendance on me, I remember it with gloom and record it with shame." She studied privately with
William Sartain, a friend of Eakins and a New York artist invited to Philadelphia to teach a group of art students, starting in 1881. Though Beaux admired Eakins more and thought his painting skill superior to Sartain's, she preferred the latter's gentle teaching style which promoted no particular aesthetic approach. Unlike Eakins, however, Sartain believed in
phrenology and Beaux adopted a lifelong belief that physical characteristics correlated with behaviors and traits. It was awarded a prize for the best painting by a female artist at the academy, and further exhibited in Philadelphia and New York. Following that seminal painting, she painted over 50 portraits in the next three years with the zeal of a committed professional artist. Her invitation to serve as a juror on the hanging committee of the academy confirmed her acceptance amongst her peers. In the mid-1880s, she was receiving commissions from notable Philadelphians and earning $500 per portrait, comparable to what Eakins commanded. When her friend Margaret Bush-Brown insisted that
Les Derniers was good enough to be exhibited at the famed
Paris Salon, Beaux relented and sent the painting abroad in the care of her friend, who managed to get the painting into the exhibition. the largest art school in Paris, and at the
Académie Colarossi, receiving weekly critiques from established masters like
Tony Robert-Fleury and
William-Adolphe Bouguereau. She wrote, "Fleury is much less benign than Bouguereau and don't temper his severities…he hinted of possibilities before me and as he rose said the nicest thing of all, 'we will do all we can to help you'…I want these men…to know me and recognize that I can do something." Though advised regularly of Beaux's progress abroad and to "not be worried about any indiscretions of ours", her Aunt Eliza repeatedly reminded her niece to avoid the temptations of Paris, "Remember you are first of all a Christian – then a woman and last of all an Artist." When Beaux arrived in Paris, the
Impressionists, a group of artists who had begun their own series of independent exhibitions from the official Salon in 1874, were beginning to lose their solidarity. Also known as the "Independents" or "Intransigents", the group which at times included
Degas,
Monet,
Sisley,
Caillebotte,
Pissarro,
Renoir, and
Berthe Morisot, had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years. Their art, though varying in style and technique, was the antithesis of the type of Academic art in which Beaux was trained and of which her teacher William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a leading master. In the summer of 1888, with classes in summer recess, Beaux worked in the fishing village of
Concarneau with the American painters
Alexander Harrison and Charles Lazar. She tried applying the plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with little success. Unlike her predecessor
Mary Cassatt, who had arrived near the beginning of the Impressionist movement 15 years earlier and who had absorbed it, Beaux's artistic temperament, precise and true to observation, would not align with Impressionism and she remained a realist painter for the rest of her career, even as
Cézanne,
Matisse,
Gauguin, and
Picasso were beginning to take art into new directions. Beaux mostly admired classic artists like
Titian and
Rembrandt. Her European training did influence her palette, however, and she adopted more white and paler coloration in her oil painting, particularly in depicting female subjects, an approach favored by Sargent as well.
Return to Philadelphia in Paris Back in the United States in 1889, Beaux proceeded to paint portraits in the
grand manner, taking as her subjects members of her sister's family and of Philadelphia's elite. In making her decision to devote herself to art, she also thought it was best not to marry, and in choosing male company she selected men who would not threaten to sidetrack her career. She resumed life with her family, and they supported her fully, acknowledging her chosen path and demanding of her little in the way of household responsibilities, "I was never once asked to do an errand in town, some bit of shopping…so well did they understand." She developed a structured, professional routine, arriving promptly at her studio, and expected the same from her models. The five years that followed were highly productive, resulting in over forty portraits. In 1890 she exhibited at the Paris Exposition, obtained in 1893 the gold medal of the
Philadelphia Art Club, and also the Dodge prize at the New York
National Academy of Design. She
exhibited her work at the
Palace of Fine Arts and
The Woman's Building at the 1893
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Her portrait of
The Reverend Matthew Blackburne Grier was particularly well-received, as was
Sita and Sarita, a portrait of her cousin Charles W. Leavitt's wife Sarah (Allibone) Leavitt in white, with a small black cat perched on her shoulder, both gazing out mysteriously. The mesmerizing effect prompted one critic to point out "the witch-like weirdness of the black kitten" and for many years, the painting solicited questions by the press. But the result was not pre-planned, as Beaux's sister later explained, "Please make no mystery about it—it was only an idea to put 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. Another highly regarded portrait from that period is
New England Woman (1895), a nearly all-white oil painting which was purchased by the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1895, Beaux became the first woman to have a regular teaching position at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she instructed in portrait drawing and painting for the next twenty years. That rare type of achievement by a woman prompted one local newspaper to state, "It is a legitimate source of pride to Philadelphia that one of its most cherished institutions has made this innovation." She was a popular instructor. In 1898, Beaux painted probably her finest portrait, Man with the Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker), now in Smithsonian American Art Museum. Drinker was Beaux's very successful brother-in-law. Cecilia Beaux considered herself a "
New Woman", a 19th-century woman who explored educational and career opportunities that had generally been denied to women. In the late 19th century
Charles Dana Gibson depicted the "New Woman" in his painting,
The Reason Dinner was Late, which is "a sympathetic portrayal of artistic aspiration on the part of young women" as she paints a visiting policeman. This "
New Woman" was successful, highly trained, and often did not marry; other such women included
Ellen Day Hale,
Mary Cassatt,
Elizabeth Nourse and
Elizabeth Coffin. Beaux was a member of Philadelphia's
The Plastic Club. Other members included
Elenore Abbott,
Jessie Willcox Smith,
Violet Oakley,
Emily Sartain, and
Elizabeth Shippen Green. Many of the women who founded the organization had been students of Howard Pyle. It was founded to provide a means to encourage one another professionally and create opportunities to sell their works of art.
New York City By 1900 the demand for Beaux's work brought clients from
Washington, D.C., to
Boston, prompting the artist to move to New York City, where she spent the winters, while summering at Green Alley, the home and studio she had built in
Gloucester, Massachusetts. While Beaux stuck to her portraits of the elite, American art was advancing into urban and social subject matter, led by artists such as
Robert Henri who espoused a totally different aesthetic, "Work with great speed..Have your energies alert, up and active. Do it all in one sitting if you can. In one minute if you can. There is no use delaying…Stop studying water pitchers and bananas and paint everyday life." He advised his students, among them
Edward Hopper and
Rockwell Kent, to live with the common man and paint the common man, in total opposition to Cecilia Beaux's artistic methods and subjects. The clash of Henri and
William Merritt Chase (representing Beaux and the traditional art establishment) resulted in 1907 in the independent exhibition by the urban realists known as "The Eight" or the
Ashcan School. Beaux and her art friends defended the old order, and many thought (and hoped) the new movement to be a passing fad, but it turned out to be a revolutionary turn in American art. In 1910, her beloved Uncle Willie died. Though devastated by the loss, at 55 year old, Beaux remained highly productive. In the next five years she painted almost 25 percent of her lifetime output and received a steady stream of honors. She had a major exhibition of 35 paintings at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C., in 1912. Despite her continuing production and accolades, however, Beaux was working against the current of tastes and trends in art. The famed "Armory Show" of 1913 in New York City was a landmark presentation of 1,200 paintings showcasing
Modernism. Beaux believed that the public, initially of mixed opinion about the "new" art, would ultimately reject it and return its favor to the Pre-Impressionists. Beaux was crippled after breaking her hip while walking in Paris in 1924. With her health impaired, her work output dwindled for the remainder of her life. In 1930 she published an
autobiography,
Background with Figures. In 1942 The National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded her a gold medal for lifetime achievement. ==Death==