Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux was a portrait painter of serious ability who spent her career being compared to Sargent, usually favourably, and occasionally being described as a good painter for a woman. She trained in Philadelphia and then Paris at the Académie Julian, and returned with a fluency that put her immediately in demand.

The brushwork is loose and confident, with whites handled particularly well. She painted Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and daughter, Georges Clemenceau, and a long line of east coast families, but the strongest pictures tend to be of people she knew well.

She taught at the Pennsylvania Academy for twenty years, the first woman on its faculty, and never married, having decided early that a career and a household would not coexist. A fall in 1924 broke her hip and effectively ended her working life.