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Cecilia Beaux

Early Days: Cecilia Beaux was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the youngest daughter of French silk manufacturer Jean Adolphe Beaux and teacher Cecilia Kent Leavitt, daughter of prominent businessman John Wheeler Leavitt of New York City and his wife Cecilia Kent of Suffield, Connecticut. Cecilia Kent Leavitt died from puerperal fever twelve days after giving birth at age thirty-three. Cecilia “Leilie” Beaux and her sister Etta were subsequently raised by their maternal grandmother and aunts, primarily in Philadelphia. Her father, unable to bear the grief of his loss, and feeling adrift in a foreign country, returned to his native France for sixteen years, with only one visit back to Philadelphia. He returned when Cecilia was two, but left four years later after his business failed. As she confessed later, “We didn’t love Papa very much, he was so foreign. We thought him peculiar”. Her father did have a natural aptitude for drawing and the sisters were charmed by his whimsical sketches of animals. Later, Beaux would discover that her French heritage would serve her well during her pilgrimage and training in France.

Career:

Her childhood was a sheltered though generally happy one. As a teen she already manifested the traits, as she described, of “both a realist and a perfectionist, pursued by an uncompromising passion for carrying through.” She attended the Misses Lyman School and was just an average student, though she did well in French and Natural History. However, she was unable to afford the extra fee for art lessons. At the age of sixteen, Beaux began art lessons with a relative, Catharine Ann Drinker, an accomplished artist who had her own studio and a going clientele. Drinker became Beaux’s role model, and she continued lessons with Drinker for a year. She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction. Given the bias of the Victorian age, female students were denied direct study in anatomy and could not attend drawing classes with live models (who were often prostitutes) until a decade later.

At eighteen, Beaux was appointed drawing teacher at Miss Sanford's School, taking over Drinker’s post. She also gave private art lessons, and produced decorative art and small portraits. Her own studies were mostly self-directed. Beaux received her first introduction to lithography doing copy work for Philadelphia printer Thomas Sinclair and she published her first work in St. Nicholas magazine in December 1873. Beaux demonstrated accuracy and patience as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for Edward D. Cope, for a multi-volume report sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey. However, she did not find technical illustration suitable for a career (the extreme exactitude required gave her pains in the “solar plexus”). At this stage, she did not consider herself an artist as yet.

Beaux began attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1876, then under the dynamic influence of Thomas Eakins, whose great work The Gross Clinic had “horrified Philadelphia Exhibition-goers as a gory spectacle” at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876. She steered clear of the controversial Eakins, though she much admired his work. His progressive teaching philosophy, focused on anatomy and live study (and allowed the female students to partake in segregated studios), eventually led to his firing as director of the Academy. She did not ally herself with Eakins' rabid student supporters, and later wrote, “A curious instinct of self-preservation kept me outside the magic circle.” Instead, she attended costume and portrait painting classes for three years taught by the ailing director Christian Schussele.