Alexander Harrison (Primary Title)
Cecilia Beaux, American, 1855 - 1942 (Artist)
Already an accomplished painter when she arrived in Paris for further training at age thirty-three, Cecilia Beaux quickly distinguished herself with bravura works such as this: a collaborative portrait of fellow Philadelphian Alexander Harrison. It is one of two fully realized paintings she produced in Concarneau, a summer artist colony in Brittany. A transitional work that reveals her embrace of plein-air (outdoor) painting and a lightened palette – an approach Harrison encouraged – it inspired his comment that Beaux had the “right stuff” to become a serious painter, “the stuff that digs and thinks and will not be satisfied and is never weary of the effort of painting nor counts the cost.”
inscribed, signed, and dated lower left: "To Alexander Harrison/ Cecilia Beaux/ Concarneau-1888"
J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane Fund for American Art and partial gift of Juliana Terian Gilbert in memory of Peter G. Terian
2021-2022 "Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters and France", Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, November 14, 2021 - March 13, 2022; VMFA, April 16 - July 31, 2022
Atlanta, GA, High Museum of Art, Cecilia Beaux, American Figure Painter, 2007-8 (toured)
Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture, 1995-96 (toured)
Atlanta, GA, High Museum of Art, Cecilia Beaux, American Figure Painter, 2007-8 (toured)
Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture, 1995-96 (toured)
Image released via Creative Commons CC-BY-NC
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