Cecilia Beaux, Green Alley

"Ernesta" by Cecilia Beaux

Green Alley was Cecilia Beaux's summer residence for over four decades. It constituted a salon for guests from the highest social and intellectual circles of Boston and the eastern seaboard, and had been built because, as she said, "I had sometimes felt that the city-winter contained too much of everything, and that the summer, if considered as a holiday, was boring. Why not have long, unhurried bouts of painting, when off hours would be spent in delicious air - morning and evenings of thrilling loveliness - a long, long summer."

She further explained: "Part-way between the lighthouse and the town of Gloucester, I began to notice a thickly wooded space on the harbor side of the road. So solid was the tangle of catbriar, primeval blueberry, ilex, bay and sassafras that entrance upon it was impossible. People said that there was no place on it for a house - it was the 'stone that the builders rejected.' It did not become mine for a year or more. 

I knew that I must not attempt to imitate a small French manor house, or farm, here. The idea 'Tropical Colonial' kept recurring, and the nondescript little house answers best, perhaps, to this tendency. I built the studio as large almost as the house - separate, on a somewhat lower level, for seclusion. The whole pretty much achieving what it was intended for - work - and friendship - the two main divisions of its owner's interests. On the evening of August 7, 1906, the first fire was kindled on the hearth at Green Alley, and I made a feint of sleeping there that night.

I never exhausted the resources of the studio. Many half-conceived designs are waiting under its dark rafters, and in the mote-full shafts of light from its high east window. My niece, Ernesta Drinker, was my choice, and chief reliance, as a model. Three times on three different years she gave me long periods of opportunity; but in these I was feeling my way, and never satisfied (if ever I was). 

That little house in the wood had its own way of being memorable. How I rejoiced in the morning, awakening near my big eastern window, to which I could creep in the early mornings of late June and see Venus flashing in a primrose sky, among the moving fringes of the tree tops. And the nights when great patches of moonlight lay on the living room floor. The even rhythm of small waves crashing upon the pebbles of the harbor beach, and to seaward the sense of the Ocean's presence and distant organ tones.

I do not forget what it was, after a morning of fierce effort, to sink, silent and exhausted, at the little table and be restored in every sense - and do not forget the pine's perfume in the sun, the deep caves of shadow, and in the season's later days the orange and scarlet tupelo leaves afloat upon the dark pool in the wood. I do not forget..."

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