Viewing page 17 of 27

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

CECELIA BEAUX
AMERICAN PORTRAIT PAINTER

"May and June in Paris 1919," Cecelia Beaux remembered a decade later,"were months to clasp and hold with the haunting sense of 'never again.' Paris itself, in its array of ordered beauty, was forever the same miracle. Bent old men watched over every leaf and flower in the parks and Champs Elysées.  Women and children with the well-known switch-brooms washed the streets at dawn. The same crystal rivulets ran in the gutters --nothing could hinder these people, the French, in the one right way of doing everything."
To Cecelia Beaux these were months of beauty in a city she had always loved; they were months, too, of waiting. One of the most important commissions of her life lay ahead -- the commission to do three of the portraits in the series of War leaders which was to be presented to the United States government. Five artists had been chosen to do three portraits each; to Miss Beaux fell Clémenceau, Cardinal Mercier, and Lord Beatty. America's most distinguished woman portraitist, she approached her task with eager interest, but with a full sense of its great significance and its innate