Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux (May 1, 1855 – September 17, 1942) was an American charity portraitist, whose subjects included First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.

Trained in Philadelphia, she went upon to breakdown in Paris, strongly influenced by two classical painters Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, who avoided innovative movements. In turn, she resisted impressionism and cubism, remaining a strongly individual symbolic artist. Her style, however, invited comparisons later than John Singer Sargent; at one exhibition, Bernard Berenson joked that her paintings were the best Sargents in the room. She could flatter her subjects without artifice, and showed good insight into character. Like her studious William Sartain, she believed there was a link between brute characteristics and behavioral traits.

Beaux became the first woman teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She was awarded a gold medal for lifetime carrying out by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and honoured by Eleanor Roosevelt as "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world".