Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) was, in the words of her colleague William Merritt Chase, “not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived”, yet most people today would draw a blank at her name. A Philadelphia-born portraitist of the Gilded Age, she became the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and painted everyone from First Lady Edith Roosevelt to French Premier Georges Clemenceau. She was routinely compared to John Singer Sargent, her male equivalent in fame and prestige. The fact that Sargent is a household name and Beaux is not hints at something depressingly familiar about how art history gets written.
To mark her birthday, here are five paintings by Beaux to feed your artistic soul.
1. The Last Days of Infancy (1883–85)
2. Sita and Sarita (1893–94)
3. Ernesta (Child with Nurse) (1894)
4. New England Woman (1895)
5. Man with the Cat (1898)
