AMERICA’S GREATEST FEMALE ARTIST?

By David E. Shi

President, Furman University

Great museums not only preserve and display art; they also freshen our understanding of important artists and their circumstances. Until September 9, the High Museum is hosting an important exhibition of the figure paintings of Cecilia Beaux. The gorgeous show reveals a great deal about the dynamics of artistic reputations and the peculiar challenges faced by women painters during the Victorian era.

Who was Cecilia Beaux? At the beginning of the 20th century, she was widely viewed as America's greatest woman artist. In 1899 the preeminent painter William Merritt Chase proclaimed that Beaux was "not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived." Her portraits won numerous gold medals at exhibitions in the United States and in Europe, and her talented brush was in great demand among the nation's social and political elite. By 1916 an art critic could assert that "Miss Beaux as an American painter has no rivals at all. . . ." Six years later, when the New York Times conducted a survey to name the "twelve greatest American women," Cecilia Beaux headed the list, which included the social activist Jane Addams and novelist Edith Wharton.

Yet Cecilia Beaux is little known today except among art historians and connoisseurs. Why did such a revered painter disappear as though she never existed? The exhibition at the High Museum, entitled "Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter," answers the question, and, in the process, tells much about the mercurial quality of artistic reputations.

Born in 1855, Cecilia Beaux grew up in a West Philadelphia household bustling with talented women. Her mother died 12 days after giving birth, and her distraught French father fled to his native Provence, leaving infant Cecilia and her sister to be raised by their widowed grandmother and two aunts. Cecilia grew up in an atmosphere of strict moral rectitude, cultural vitality, nurturing love, and hard work.

Beaux was educated at home and then spent two years at a Philadelphia finishing school. By the age of sixteen, she had decided to turn her talent for drawing into a career. To generate income, she first painted portraits of children on ceramic plates to be hung on parlor walls. In the 1880s, however, the self-assured, vivacious Beaux was able to begin taking formal art lessons. But her guardians insisted that she work with a private instructor so as to avoid being exposed to the "coarse" behavior and vulgar language of male art students--as well as nude models. In 1883 she opened a studio in Philadelphia and produced her first major canvas, a stunning portrait of her sister and nephew. It won first prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition and later drew excited attention at exhibitions in New York and Paris. Beaux's precocious success led to more study in Paris that greatly broadened her horizons and deepened her sophistication.

Beaux returned to Philadelphia in 1889 and soon thereafter her reputation as a portrait painter of the wealthy and famous soared. Her works were widely exhibited and praised, and her connections in the art world grew ever more extensive. In 1895 she became the first woman instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy, and the next year, after a triumphant exhibition at the Paris Salon, she was elected to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In 1901 she was invited to the White House to paint Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and her daughter. She was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1902. Yale and the University of Pennsylvania later awarded her honorary degrees.

Beaux's sumptuous portraits resemble those of the more celebrated John Singer Sargent. But where Sargent was self-consciously theatrical, Beaux was more reserved--a technician rather than a performer with a brush. Tall and slender, intelligent and imperious, she abhorred ostentation. Where Sargent assaulted the canvas with panache and cleverness, she labored over her subject's composition and treatment in an effort to capture the "weight of personality." She once told a friend: "I never do anything easily."

For all of Cecilia Beaux's obvious talent and success, however, her reputation quickly faded after her death in 1943. Her sole focus on portraiture diminished her stature. Art critics and historians prefer painters with wider interests. Yet Beaux dismissed such bias. She had to earn a living through her art. "It doesn't pay to paint everybody," she explained. In addition, her emphasis on patrician men and sheltered women and children has alienated many modern art critics. Even more important in explaining Beaux's declining stature was her resistance to changing artistic fashions. Unlike her rival Philadelphian, Mary Cassatt, she did not embrace Impressionism or any other "rebel" movement. Beaux shunned the avant-garde. She once dismissed Cubism as "egotistical, insane, insincere and ugly."

Such artistic conservatism has grated on art historians and critics. Equally disturbing to such modern sensibilities is that Beaux doubted that women painters would ever display the creative power of a Rubens or Michelangelo. "To produce a great painting," she insisted, "requires a certain objectivity which is rare in women." But Beaux also stressed that, in the end, "success is sexless." As the exhibition at the High Museum reveals, her own success within a male-dominated profession deserves renewed attention and acclaim.