41 Facts About Cecilia Beaux

Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Cecilia Beaux was trained in Philadelphia and went on to study in Paris where she was influenced by academic artists Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau as well as the work of Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Cecilia Beaux's style was compared to that of John Singer Sargent; at one exhibition, Bernard Berenson joked that her paintings were the best Sargents in the room.

Cecilia Beaux was awarded a gold medal for lifetime achievement by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and honored by Eleanor Roosevelt as "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world".

Cecilia Beaux's mother was the daughter of prominent businessman John Wheeler Leavitt of New York City and his wife, Cecilia Kent of Suffield, Connecticut.

Cecilia Beaux returned when Cecilia was two, but left four years later after his business failed.

Later, Cecilia Beaux would discover that her French heritage would serve her well during her pilgrimage and training in France.

Cecilia Beaux's childhood was a sheltered though generally happy one.

At age 16, Cecilia Beaux began art lessons with a relative, Catherine Ann Drinker, an accomplished artist who had her own studio and a growing clientele.

Cecilia Beaux 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.

At 18, Cecilia Beaux was appointed as a drawing teacher at Miss Sanford's School, taking over Drinker's post.

Cecilia Beaux gave private art lessons and produced decorative art and small portraits.

Cecilia 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.

Cecilia 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 US Geological Survey.

Cecilia 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.

Cecilia Beaux steered clear of the controversial Eakins, though she much admired his work.

Cecilia Beaux's 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.

Cecilia Beaux won the Mary Smith Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibitions in 1885,1887,1891, and 1892.

Unlike Eakins Sartain believed in phrenology and Cecilia Beaux adopted a lifelong belief that physical characteristics correlated with behaviors and traits.

Cecilia Beaux attended Sartain's classes for two years, then rented her own studio and shared it with a group of women artists who hired a live model and continued without an instructor.

Cecilia Beaux painted a large canvas in 1884, Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance, a portrait of her sister and nephew whose composition and style revealed a debt to James McNeill Whistler and whose subject matter was akin to Mary Cassatt's mother-and-child paintings.

When her friend Margaret Bush-Brown insisted that Les Derniers was good enough to be exhibited at the famed Paris Salon, Cecilia Beaux relented and sent the painting abroad in the care of her friend, who managed to get the painting into the exhibition.

At 32, despite her success in Philadelphia, Cecilia Beaux decided that she still needed to advance her skills.

When Cecilia 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.

Cecilia Beaux tried applying the plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with little success.

Back in the United States in 1889, Cecilia Beaux proceeded to paint portraits in the grand manner, taking as her subjects members of her sister's family and of Philadelphia's elite.

Cecilia Beaux exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

In 1895, Cecilia 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.

In 1896, Cecilia Beaux returned to France to see a group of her paintings presented at the Salon.

Cecilia Beaux considered herself a "New Woman", a 19th-century woman who explored educational and career opportunities that had generally been denied to women.

Cecilia Beaux's portraits Fanny Travis Cochran, Dorothea and Francesca, and Ernesta and her Little Brother, are fine examples of her skill in painting children; Ernesta with Nurse, one of a series of essays in luminous white, was a highly original composition, seemingly without precedent.

Cecilia Beaux became a member of the National Academy of Design in 1902.

Cecilia Beaux managed to find new subjects for portraiture, working in the mornings and enjoying a leisurely life the rest of the time.

Cecilia Beaux carefully regulated her energy and her activities to maintain a productive output, and considered that a key to her success.

Cecilia Beaux had a major exhibition of 35 paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 1912.

Cecilia 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.

Cecilia Beaux was crippled after breaking her hip while walking in Paris in 1924.

That same year Cecilia Beaux was asked to produce a self-portrait for the Medici collection in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Cecilia Beaux died at the age of 87 on September 17,1942, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Cecilia Beaux was buried at West Laurel Hill Cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

The ordinary ones are signed John Sargent, the best are signed Cecilia Beaux, which is, of course, nonsense in more ways than one, but it is part of the generous chorus of praise.