Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #586921 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 195 pages

From the Inside Flap
"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

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful Art book
While Cecilia Beaux is often overlooked, she was a great American figure painter, close to, if not quite in the same league, as John Singer Sargent. This book has good representation of her work, the more well know, and the lesser. A must have of anyone who is a fan of this period and style of art.

Nice Discovery
A number of years ago I enrolled into an art history course at my local community college, Women in Art. I was suprised, awed and sorry never to have known about some of the women artists when studying art at a university. Shadwoed by the likes of John Singer Sargent, Cecila Beaux can hold her own. Many female artists did not have the same advantages as their male counterparts. But Ms. Beaux built up her own cliental making her own name in the art of portraiture. This is a nice book depicitng the lifestylies of Americana during the age of innocence. A must have for any coffee table. Nice instruction on another American female artisits almost lost in history.

comprehenisve
Though thorough, the many author's perspectives were not pleasing. Beautiful work by an amazing artist and the reproductions were acceptable but not thrilling.