Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
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 Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Her 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. Like her instructor William Sartain, she believed there was a connection between physical characteristics and behavioral traits.
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".
Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024