Cecilia Beaux, Pursuing La Verité

 

"Mr. and Mrs.Anson Phelps Stokes" by Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux wrote: "M. Julien had a few words with me, very serious, and with some emotion, to which my beating heart, of course, responded. 'Mademoiselle,' he urged, 'you must devote yourself to the expression of feeling. Do not waste your time upon trivial subjects' - or words to that effect. I always felt that he looked upon me with a kind of anxiety, as if he feared that I would go astray, wander, exaggerate, not adhere to the noble 'truth only' which was the ideal held before us by 'les maitres'; and one day, a year after, when I was working in a little studio I had taken in the rue Notre Dame des Champs, he suddenly appeared there to my great astonishment.

'Mademoiselle,' he said, with intense and solemn earnestness (and then followed the estimate of my 'talent' as shown in the Cours, and which may be omitted here). 'Mais, Mademoiselle, mais, je crains pour vous, je crains pour vous! [But, Miss, but, I fear for you, I fear for you!] I think I must have sworn adherence to 'La Verité' [the Truth] and to that only, and it was an adherence that I was already, if not vowed to, making daily practice of, with all that within me was.

I am glad that my long hours in the Life-Class were untroubled by doubt. I was working my way into the mystery of Nature, like a chipmunk storing up what could be used later, every step revealing secrets of vision I burned to express; to cease from blundering and begin to conquer, to state what I saw as being a salvage of the best; discovery of integral  truth, discovery of means to report it that would mate with my emotion.

I made one or two attempts at painting and found that without space and power to move, I got nowhere. I could neither see nor feel, and I felt smothered among the canvases about me. I decided to give up painting in the class, and devoted all my time to drawing, the difference of scale taking the place of space. I tried only to learn the figure, amazing enough in the pose, but when the rest came, and I could see what movement revealed, I attempted only to get it by heart, to store up passages, articulations, weight. I must wait for painting.

What peace, what space for deliberation, there was in being a student! I did not have to think of exhibition or any of the sordid growths that flourish about student life when permitted, and in fact are planted by their directors in many schools now. It was all between the fascinating object and myself."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Background with Figures" by Cecilia Beaux.)