Studio: international art (17.1899)

Cecilia Beaux

T

HE WORK OF CECILIA
BEAUX. BY MRS. ARTHUR
BELL (N. D’ANVERS).

Of French descent, but of American
parentage, the talented American artist,
Cecilia Beaux, who has during the last few years
risen to high rank as a portrait-painter, was born
in Philadelphia, and received her earliest lessons
in drawing from Mrs. Thomas Janvier, of that city.
Her first independent work was making drawings
on stone of fossils, &c., for one of the American
scientific societies, and she probably owes much of
her remarkable draughts-
manship to the practice
in rigid accuracy thus ac-
quired. Later she studied
under Professor van der
Nielen andWilliamSartain,
the latter a painter of some
little local reputation.

In 1885 was exhibited
at the Pennsylvania
Academy the earliest im-
portant work of Cecilia
Beaux, The Last days of
Infancy, which won for
her the Mary Smith Prize,
and excited general ad-
miration on account of
its accurate drawing, its
delicate colouring, and its
force of expression. In
spite of the applause she
had already won the young
artist was, however, still
far from content with the
training she had received,
and resolved to go to
Paris to study at the foun-
tain-head.

She arrived at the
French capital in 1889
and entered the Atelier
Julian, where Robert
Fleury, Bougereau, and
Constant were then among
the visiting masters. She
also worked for a time
under Courtois and Dag-
nan-Bouveret, so that the
criticism she received
must have been of a
most varied character and

XVII. No. 78.—September, 1899.

probably often not a little contradictory. As a
matter of fact, any one familiar with the work of
Cecilia Beaux might suppose that she had been a
pupil of Carolus Duran, for her pictures have
something of the distinction which characterises
all portraits by that painter. With his favourite
pupil, her fellow-countryman John Singer Sargent,
she has also a marked affinity, but, so far as has
been ascertained, she received no direct teaching
from either of them. She must, however, have
been familiar, as was every one during her residence
in Paris, with their exhibited portraits and was
possibly unconsciously influenced by them. She

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SITA AND SARITA ”

BY CECILIA BEAUX

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