Cecilia Beaux, Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance

"Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance" by Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux wrote: For two years my classes with William Sartain continued, and it then became inconvenient for him to come to us regularly from New York. By that time, as I had been doing some portraits on the side I was able to take a studio and the class painted there, with a model on certain days, without instruction.

Finding myself in a large barren studio I began to think of a picture. I saw it complete in composition, the figures, lighting and accessories. I took an old piece of sketching board and did the composition small, but containing all the important masses, lines and color. The subject was to be my sister, seated, full-length, with her first-born son in her lap. The picture was to be 'landscape' in form, and the figures were to be seen as if one stood over them. The mother in black sat in a low chair, the brown-eyed boy of three almost reclining in her arms. He was to wear a short blue-and-white cotton garment, his bare legs trailing over his mother's knees. Her head was bent over him, and his hands lay upon her very white ones, which were clasped around him.

The first and greatest difficulty was to gain the family's cooperation. My sister would have to bring the boy to town, an hour's trip in the horse-cars, climb eighty-four steps, and probably do this many times. When she had nothing to wear like the design I envisioned, an old black jersey of mine did very well, and, as the picture was to show only one arm fully, I made one black satin sleeve, fitting closely, with a little rich lace at the wrist. Around my sister's knees and lap, and exactly taking the lines of a skirt, we draped a shawl of my grandmother that had been dyed black. When I felt the need of a strong horizontal mass across the canvas behind the group and lower in value than the section above it, I found a piece of panelling in a carpenter's shop and dyed it to look like mahogany.

It took some time to place the figures in precisely the right position on the canvas and to find precisely the right size and proportion for it. Even after the picture was started, I changed the canvas and stretcher twice, and of course leaned heavily upon the original sketch, which contained every essential mass. The labor, the difficulties, I remember perhaps as little as a mother does her hours of travail. My sister bore her part with her usual gallantry. The boy was extremely amused by the novelty of the scene in which he found himself. In the rests he enjoyed running out into the hall with me to get a distant view of the canvas through the open door.

When it was first seen at the Pennsylvania Academy, one of my friends, who had been a student in France, was filled with determination to take the picture back with her to Paris and send it to the Salon. 'The Salon!' I screamed. What insanity it was! But she persisted. Her letter brought me the news of her stretching it and carrying it on top of a cab to the studio of Jean Paul Laurens to get his criticism and advice as to entering it for the Spring Salon. I have no record of the words of the actual interview, but the great man strongly favored her sending it, so she got an impromptu frame and offered it to Fate. 

It had no allies. I was no one's pupil or protegee; it was the work of an unheard-of American. But it was accepted and well hung on a centre wall - and my purpose was formed to go myself to Europe as soon as possible.

To be continued

(Excerpts from Cecilia Beaux's autobiography "Background with Figures.")