CECILIA BEAUX 1855-1942
The Dreamer, 1894
Oil on canvas, 33 X 25" (83.82 x 63.50 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 929-0-101
 

The Dreamer is an excellent example of the compelling portraits painted by Cecilia Beaux during the 1890s. Considered by many to be the finest woman painter active in America at the turn of the century, Beaux was not only technically masterful in her rich, vigorous manipulation of paint and her subtle orchestration of color, but also as a keen observer and an innovative designer. By 1902 Beaux was recognized as one of the top portrait painters in America. She had exhibited her work and garnered prizes in museum exhibitions from Philadelphia to New York to Paris.1 She was awarded full membership in the male-dominated National Academy. And perhaps just as telling of her popularity, she painted a portrait of Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and her daughter in the White House, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Daughter Ethel (1901-02, private collection).
Beaux was born in Philadelphia. Due to her mother's early death and her French father's subsequent departure to Europe, she was raised by her maternal grandmother and aunt. The example of her aunt, the artist Eliza Lewitt, was a very positive one for her. With her family's support and her aunt's inspiration, Beaux set out to be a painter. At the age of sixteen she studied drawing under Catherine Drinker, an historical and religious painter whose brother later married Beaux's sister. In 1872 or 1873, she took instruction from Adolf Van der Whalen, a Dutch artist active in Philadelphia. She also appears to have taken classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts between 1877 and 1879 under Thomas Eakins. Additionally, between 1881 and 1883, Beaux studied semi-privately in a friend's studio with William Sartain. Between 1888 and 1889, Beaux traveled to Europe where she studied at the Acad6mie Julian and the Colarrosi Academie under Bouguereau, Fleury, Dagnan-Bouveret, and Courtois, as well as privately with Benjamin Constant. In 1895, she became the first full-time woman faculty member at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she would teach drawing, painting, and portraiture for the next twenty years.
The Dreamer is a wonderfully evocative work from Beaux's finest period. Through the placement of the sitter's expressive face and hands in the immediate foreground, Beaux draws us into the woman's contemplative world. Intriguingly, she makes the dreamy vision more immediately palpable through the juxtaposition of the crisply- observed features of the beautiful, somewhat melancholy young woman to her vaguely delineated immediate surroundings. The sitter's riveting, dark-eyed gaze and upright posture first engage, then confound us with their lack of context, suggesting her isolation through reverie.
Beaux's rich use of buttery strokes and exquisitely fine-tuned orchestration of whites and blacks reveal her respect for the preeminent portrait painter of her day, John Singer Sargent. The flattened picture plane, cropped forms, and bold reductive masses also indicate her thorough understanding of Japanese art as interpreted by such leading French Impressionists as Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas. Yet the sensitively sculpted features, deeply expressive eyes, and candidly engaging pose reveal Beaux's distinctly personal mastery of the art of portraiture. Although the sitter, Caroline Smith, was a close friend of Beaux's from Philadelphia, the artist sought in The Dreamer to evoke a mood rather than to present an identifiable personality. In such intimate works depicting friends or family, as in Ernesta with Nurse (1894, Metropolitan Museum of Art ) and Henry Sturgis Drinker (1898, National Museum of Art Beaux excelled as an insightful portraitist. After 1900, however, her work became increasingly more superficial despite her extraordinary technical facility. By the time she had gained virtually universal recognition as one of America's leading portrait painters in the teens and early twenties, much of her early edge had eroded.

JAMES M. KENY