Cecilia Beaux, An Accident

Cecilia Beaux's Self-Portrait at the Uffizi

"At the age of sixty-eight Cecilia Beaux made a final visit to Paris traveling with her cousin, May Whitlock. Soon after their arrival, both women were bedridden, Beaux with a virus and May with bronchitis. The two women recuperated and stayed on until the summer of 1924, planning to return on July 5th. Then disaster. She wrote to a friend: 'Instead of sailing on the 5th, I fell on my side and broke my hip..."

She spent three months at the English Clinic in Paris immobilized on her back. Her maid arrived at the end of July. Ernesta rushed to her aid in the interim. When Beaux finally returned home in the fall, she was permanently disabled. 'Never again was she to take a step save to hobble on mechanical support,' her cousin recalled. Beaux was in despair, but fate was to offer her another opportunity.

Sorting through the mail that had piled up in Gloucester during her long absence, she opened one from the Italian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Inside was a note from the Italian Ambassador and a letter from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, requesting a self-portrait for their collection. Should Beaux accept this honor she would join a respected group of artists represented in the gallery, including Peter Paul Rubens, William Holman Hunt, Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Eugene Delacroix. 'My astonishment and satisfaction were witness to my deep appreciation of such an honor,' she recalled. 'Although I had not tried to paint since my accident, I at once began dragging myself about.'

The portrait she painted was astonishing. Her brush was honest. She captured her own personality as deftly and impartially as she had rendered her clients during her long career."

To be continued

(Excerpt from "Cecilia Beaux: A Modern Painter in the Gilded Age" by Alice A. Carter.)