Cecilia Beaux, Well Done

"Ernesta, Child with Nurse" by Cecilia Beaux

"In April 1926 Cecilia Beaux received a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award was the first the Academy had bestowed on a woman in twenty-one years, and as such, it carried the implication that Beaux's name would endure as the principal female artist of her era. But this latest award combined with all her other accomplishments would not suffice.

In 1928 she began to work on an autobiography. It took her two years to complete 'Background with Figures.' The book was published in 1930 when she was seventy-five years old. It garnered favorable reviews, although their content must have caused her some consternation.

One critic wrote: 'Though on the fringe of modernism, Miss Beaux was of the group that remained blissfully detached from its influence and spent her talent in that school of sophisticated portraiture which has discreetly passed.' Another wrote that it brought back the 'charm of the old-fashioned life.'

Beaux may have expected that the publication of her autobiography would be her last creative endeavor, but there was to be one last tribute. In 1935 The American Academy of Arts and Letters put together a retrospective exhibition of sixty-two of her paintings. The occasion was noted by a friend: 

'A vivid picture I cherish at the opening reception, sumptuous as ever in attire, responding to homage, surrounded, extolled, the cause, the living center, of the ranks of glowing portraits which looked down from those gallery walls, looked down upon the throngs that rendered praise, looked down and spoke as clearly as with words of the years of devotion to their creation, of the free flow of the artist's genius, of the joy that was hers in recording for posterity the beauty she perceived in man, the beauty visual, spiritual, intangible, indefinable save by her brush.'

Cecilia Beaux died on September 17, 1942, at Green Alley. Two hundred people attended her memorial service at the Calvary Protestant Episcopal Church in New York. The sculptor Paul Manship gave the eulogy. Another friend wrote concerning her to a friend, ' You know, it was not Cecilia's honors and medals - [she] had the thrill in living. It was in her painting as well...You know my friends do not die. I find them in everything years afterward.'"

The End  

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