Cecilia Beaux - Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance [1885]

Cecilia Beaux - Les Derniers Jours d'Enfance [1885], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

When Cecilia Beaux (American, 1855 – 1942) arrived in Paris, the Impressionists were beginning to lose their solidarity. In the summer of 1888, with classes in summer recess, Beaux worked in the fishing village of Concarneau with the American painters Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar. She tried applying the plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with little success. Unlike her predecessor Mary Cassatt, who had arrived near the beginning of the Impressionist movement fifteen years earlier and who had absorbed it, Beaux's artistic temperament, precise and true to observation, would not align with Impressionism and she remained a realist painter for the rest of her career. Beaux mostly admired classic artists like Titian and Rembrandt. Her European training did influence her palette, however, and she adopted a greater use of white and paler coloration in her oil painting, particularly in depicting female subjects, an approach favoured by Sargent as well.

[Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 137.2 cm]