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Cecelia Beaux                               199
beautiful to her even in the November Mistral.  All that she saw and touched of Europe wove itself into the pattern she was creating for herself.
  Inevitably, the most important months were those spent in Paris.  She enrolled at the Atelier Julien where Fleury, Bouguereau, and Constant were among the visiting masters.  It was a large place, busy with students from every country of Europe and operated by Julien on a strictly commercial basis.  To Miss Beaux its impersonality was one of its salient features.  After on winter, she returned for another, certain that the type of training under visiting critics was for her, primarily self-taught except for the help she had received from Sartain, more helpful than would ne the more exciting atmosphere of a great painter's studio.  Moreover, after her first winter in Paris, she knew of no master whose work at the exhibitions had impressed her with a wish to commit herself solely to his guidance.  "At Julien's, "she wrote, "one had not to think of adherence...What I got chiefly was encouragement to keep on as I was going.  I am not sure that there is not a good deal to be said for silent treatment in Art.  All special direction and theory are liable-almost certain-to be in error, sooner or later...The men who criticised at Julien's were not great, but they had beliefs.  Their work was personal and unmistakable, but they laid down no laws of their own invention.  The great effect of this large general method, if method it was, is the faith one had in it."
  Miss Beaux's work has often been compared to that of Carolus Duran (for whose paintings, as she saw them at the exhibitions, she did not care) and Sargent, both of whom were great figures on the Paris scene when she went there to study.  She did not, contrary to some rumors, study with either of them-nor, except for one month's criticism from Charles Lazar, with any other master.  The Atelier Julien fed her faith in herself, kept alive her desire to work, and made clear the general road.  The details she worked out by herself.
  Aside from the atelier, there were two other teachers from whom she learned much during those first Paris winters-the city