Eliza Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was American painter, considered one of the finest society portraitist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and proven rival of John Singer Sargent in the art of fashionable portraiture.
She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at 16 she took up the study of art. Under the tutelage of her cousin, Catharine Drinker Janvier, an artist, and later of Adolf van der Whelen and William Sartain, she developed into a skilled painter. In 1883 she opened a studio in Philadelphia.
During 1888-89 Cecilia Beaux traveled and studied in Europe, taking art instruction at the Académie Julian in Paris from several leading artists, including William-Adolphe Bouguereau and Tony Robert Fleury. In 1890 she exhibited at the Paris Exposition.
Returning to Philadelphia, Miss Beaux earned a reputation as one of the city's best portrait painters and achieved considerable success over the next several years. In 1895 she became the first woman instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1896 she exhibited six portraits at the Paris Salon. She became a member of the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1902.
Among her portraits are those of "Georges Clemenceau", "Edith Roosevelt and her daughter" and "Admiral Sir David Beatty". Her "Dorothea and Francesca", a compositionally complex double portrait, and "Ernesta and her Little Brother", are good examples of her skill in painting children. Beaux was influenced by the French Impressionists, but her work was not imitative of any master. After moving to New York in 1900, she received a series of important commissions.
Following an injury in 1924 she painted little. In 1930 she published an autobiography entitled Background with Figures. She was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1933, and two years later the academy presented a retrospective exhibit of some 65 of her canvases.
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