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CECELIA BEAUX
difficulties. These portraits of great me were to be preserved in America so that future generations might know the faces of the leaders who had brought the world through a dark hour. Great portraits of great people were, Miss Beaux believed, extremely rare. "To give posterity any idea of their power by an appearance static and material requires in the approacher a conscious and just mind no less than the gods" gift of subconscious force," she wrote.  
Measured by the results of her work, Miss Beaux reveals herself to have the "conscious and just mind" and the "God's gift of subconscious force." The excellence of her portraits is a matter of record. Their interest is, however, greatly enhanced by the full account she has left of the methods by which she approached and executed her work. In the autobiographical volume, "Background with Figures," there are no more interesting or illuminating chapters than those devoted to the months she spent in Europe in 1919 and 1920 doing the portraits of the three War leaders.
From the beginning she was impressed with the apparent diversity of the three men assigned to her, but even sharper in her mind was the fact that they possessed so much in common-patriotism, faith, courage, and endurance.  The Cardinal was a saint; Clemenceau, from hos own mouth, a sceptic.  But, strangely enough, should found that in passing from one to the other no mental readjustment was needed: "Between their country and the enemy within and without each 'withstood.' One of them had denounced Saint Paul openly, but he was really of the same mind. 'Having done all, to stand.'  Both those heroes did so. They stood to receive death or worse, if need be, for Belgium, for France, and, as we now know, for the World.  They withstood the Nation's despair and made way for hope and new effort, and such as their strength and destiny that neither fell under the weight they upheld alone, for it was the soul of their countrymen that they bore up, inspired, and equipped for victory." In Lord Beatty she found too, the same resoluteness, valor, and simplicity, dedicated to the career which for centuries has called to England's ablest young men-the career of ships and the sea.