Viewing page 21 of 27

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

CECELIA BEAUX          197
must be seen in the Tribune, lighted from far above.  Color was of little consequence; the great head and the action alone important" Clemenceau was the Voice of France; as such she must show him.
  When, Later, she came to the actual sittings her concept was far advanced, her preliminary sketch long since ready.  The sittings, aside from the pleasure of personal contact with a great man, served only to refresh her "knowledge of forms, correct mistakes of measurement and proportion, and above all get a repeated first-hand view of his positive, yet so intricate personality."  The reality of the man who was the heart, the soul, the voice of his people was fixed in her mind beyond any possibility of erasure or even of major alteration.  She put the finishing touches upon the portrait in New York months later.  The reality had not faded.
  Cecelia Beaux's admiration for the man whom she thought of as the voice of France was not strange.  Both by inheritance and a lifetime of experience France and its people were near and dear to her.  She had first gone to Paris in the 1880's, a girl in her twenties.  Since that first visit, she had studied and worked and lived in Paris for considerable periods.  Back of her personal experience lay her ancestral heritage.  One half of Cecelia Beaux was purely French, the French of Providence; the other half was American, the American of New England.  The blend in her eyes, as in many others, was a happy one.
  Philadelphia was the city of her childhood and although, from her earliest memories, she was a motherless little girl, she was, on the whole, a contented one, secure in the loving care of a wise and devoted grandmother and a large family circle.  The relatives in America were all on her mother's side, since her father, Jean Adolphe Beaux, was a Frenchman, born in the Nimes and brought up in Avignon, who, having come to the United States to found a silk factory, fell promptly in love with a pretty young Cecelia Leavitt and married her as soon as her parents were convinced that the European background of the French suitor was impeccable.
  The influences of Cecelia's home life were of the highest character.  Her French father was a deeply religious man, devoted