Many American artists traveled to Paris, France, to further their careers. Several of the American portraitists, realists, impressionists, and abstract artists that studied, lived, and worked in Paris, France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrote letters home to family and friends describing their lives there. One of these artists was Cecilia Beaux, and here you will find letters dating from her art studies in Europe in 1888-1889.
Many American artists traveled to Paris, France, to further their careers. Several of the American portraitists, realists, impressionists, and abstract artists that studied, lived, and worked in Paris, France during the late 19th and early 20th centuries wrote letters home to family and friends describing their lives there. One of these artists was Cecilia Beaux, and here you will find letters dating from her art studies in Europe in 1888-1889.
Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was an influential portraitist in Philadelphia before she traveled to Europe to further her art education in 1888. She joined the Académie Julien in Paris, where she received criticisms from Tony Robert Fleury and William Adolph Bougereau, and spent the summer in Concarneau, Brittany, where Alexander Harrison and Charles Lazar critiqued her work. After returning to Paris, Beaux attended the Académie Colarossi under Benjamin Constant. She copied paintings and classical sculpture at the Louvre, and traveled throughout Europe to view the works of old masters, before finally returning to Philadelphia in 1889. She returned to Europe several times, including a trip to Paris in 1896, to see six of her paintings exhibited at the Salon de Champs de Mars. At the time this was an unprecedented number of paintings shown there by an American, and their strength earned her a membership in the Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She would continue to paint portraits for much of the rest of her life, including of Cardinal Mercier, Admiral Beatty, and Georges Clemenceau in 1919 as the official portraitist of the United States War Portraits Commission after World War I.
Explore the rest of the fully digitized Cecilia Beaux papers on the Archives of American Art website!