At the turn of the twentieth century, the celebrated American artist William Merritt Chase named Cecilia Beaux “not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived.” While Beaux—unlike her contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt—has not fared well in modernist-driven art history, her work has become the subject of renewed interest on the part of art historians, collectors, and general viewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and her forty-year career represents a compelling and under-examined chapter in the history of American art. Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter is the most comprehensive appraisal of Beaux’s talent in more than three decades. This handsomely illustrated book presents a range of the artist’s strongest work and offers a fresh understanding of her career by examining critical questions of gender, class, and the importance of place. It features substantive essays which examine Beaux’s participation in the international portrait market of the 1890s, explore the artist’s professional identity and changing fortunes through a close reading of key images, investigate Beaux’s sensitivity to the framing and display of her work. An illustrated chronology of Beaux’s life and work, compiled by Alison Bechtel Wexler, completes the study.

Copub: High Museum

Preface and Acknowledgments, by Sylvia Yount
Lenders to the Exhibition
Director's Foreword, by Michael E. Shapiro

Family Pictures, by Sylvia Yount
Cecilia Beaux and the Rise of American Portraiture in the 1890s, by Kevin Sharp
The Queen Stands Alone, by Nina Auerbach
Framing Beaux, by Mark Bockrath
Catalogue of the Exhibition

Cecilia Beaux: A Chronology, by Alison Bechtel Wexler
Bibliography
Index

Sylvia Yount is the Louise B. and J. Harwood Cochrane Curator of American Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Kevin Sharp is Director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee. Nina Auerbach is John Welsh Centennial Professor of History and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Mark Bockrath is Paintings Conservator at Barbara A. Buckley & Associates, West Chester, Pennsylvania.

"Though not as well known as her contemporary Mary Cassatt, Beaux was in fact the most famous American woman artist of the nineteenth century. These essays are excellent resources for those teaching and writing about nineteenth-century American art."—Cécile Whiting, author of Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s

Previous Exhibition Dates:
High Museum of Art, May 12-September 9, 2007
Tacoma Art Museum, September 29, 2007-January 6, 2008
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, February 2-April 13, 2008
Sylvia Yount, Kevin Sharp, Nina Auerbach, and Mark Bockrath

W.E. Fischelis Award, The Victorian Society in America