As to the intelligent foreigner-Monsieur Philippe Gill in his very condensed review of the Salon of 1896 stopped to observe, "They are also excellent portraits, those exhibited by Madame Cecilia Beaux; that of the little Ernesta' because of its charm, that of Doctor Grier' because of the simplicity of the attitude and the solid execution of the details." "They are so many American types," said the Journal des Arts, "faithfully rendered

in both their general and individual features. As to the technical methods, there is a careful search for whites accompanied by pink and violet tones." "This Philadelphia lady," wrote M. Arsène Alexandre in the Figaro, "will certainly attract much attention from the artists this year by her fine series of portraits, very skil fully painted in a very fresh gamut of whites, and with a clearly defined sentiment of race. Among others, the portrait of an elderly lady in a morning negligé, white. and lilac, is a work of intimate observation and a piece of good painting." "After the manner of certain old masters," says another, "this artist seems to have rendered the haunting quality of the human eye. In each of her faces the eyeballs have a strange acuteness of vision And this look, constantly pursuing us, varies nevertheless with the age and the sex-surprised and delighted in the children, strange and with a deep troubling fixity in the portrait of the young girl in a reverie, it becomes harder, of a lesser radiation, but singularly sharp and piercing in the masculine model whose features Mlle. Beaux has so firmly designed. The brush of the American artist has a fine fulness of touch. The whites, of which she

ity has triumphed over all suggestions of her foreign masters, and the combination of refinement and strength is altogether her own." So good a painter as Mr. Chase, in his running discourse to his Philadelphia pupils in the galleries of the Pennsylvania Academy, calling their attention to Miss Beaux's pictures, spoke of her as, in his opinion, the greatest living woman painter. Of her portraits he said that not only were they painted well, but they were also characterized by all the finer qualities of artistic feeling everywhere appreciated. "You were voted in," as Associée of the new Salon, wrote Alexander Harrison, " with a hatful of ballots to spare-and entirely upon the merits of your handsome panel of portraits."

is fond, are soberly and vigorously treated." M. Henri Rochefort, summing up his impressions of the Salon of 1896 for the Paris Herald, felt himself obliged to admit, "not without regret, that not one of our women painters in France-including Mlle. Abbéma-is of sufficient strength to compare with her who gives us this year the portrait of Doctor Grier. The composition, the transparency of the flesh tones, the solidity of the design, everything is without trickery and without any searching for fireworks."

Occasionally, in these discriminating eulogies, there appear glimpses of that somewhat unwilling respect for the AngloSaxon characteristics which may be found from time to time in French speech. The slowness toward "fireworks," the disposition toward self-concentration, introspection and silence as contrasted with Gallic posturing and oratory, have been discovered again by some of these French critics in the modern Anglo-Saxon school of portraiture. With their fixed determination to find some personal leader for every

sentiments," or endeavor to win the applause of the servants." They are not sufficient to themselves, they offer themselves for examination, they wish to be seen, they live only for others, they belong to the mob!

The interest which is always found in familiar things seen from a new point of view may give importance to this opinion of Miss Beaux's sitters, set forth with Parisian freedom of speech in a friendly letter to another artist, an American, himself not without prejudices in favor of his fair compatriot. The writer, recently deceased, kindly and philosophical, has been walking through the galleries of the Champ de Mars and amusing himself and his friend by some considerations upon originality in art" until he comes to the aimable nom of Madame Cecilia Beaux, " around which the laurel twines readily:" "This is, then, what she has to tell us that all the American girls have not the assurance-I would not venture to say the impudence-to thrust themselves before the world that they might laugh in its face, . no, they do not all chatter like a flock of parrakeets; the bicycle and the tandem, which perhaps are not of their invention, are not their sole delights. Madame Cecilia Beaux demonstrates to us that they have, among themselves, thoughtful moments the most natural and the most graceful, something almost like timidity, even when they are not before the world, and with this a surrounding atmosphere of gayety, freshness, and smiling, just like a ray of sunlight coming through the window. Pretty as plums on the tree, Madame Cecilia Beaux presents them to us as fruits of the garden'-is not that it? truly American."

The work of this artist, thus appreciated by her contemporaries, is all of comparatively recent date. She is Philadelphian apparently only by accident of birth, her family name being Provençal, but her first beginnings in art were made in that city-drawings on stone of fossils for the United States Geological Reports, executed with scientific accuracy of detail. Her first instructions in art were received from Miss Catherine A. Drinker, who is now Mrs. Thomas A. Janvier. They were continued in the school of Professor Adolf van der Wielen, and in a class presided

over by William Sartain she received her first lessons in painting. In Paris, where she spent the winters of 1889 and '90, she entered the life classes in the Academy Julien, under Tony Robert-Fleury, Bouguereau and Constant, and afterward at Colarossi's she received criticisms from Courtois and Dagnan - Bouveret. But much of the best influence by which she profited abroad she found in a summer at Concarneau with Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar.

The safety that was gathered from this multitude of counsellors was, however, scarcely of their contributing; from them she did not receive definite instructions in the technique of painting, but of design only, and her capacity for color work seems to have developed itself from the very earliest commissions, for children's portraits, mostly from photographs, executed on porcelain. It was another demonstration of Delacroix's dictum-On sait son métier tout de suite ou on ne le sait jamais. The painter's trade thus readily learned bore fruit in professional reward almost immediately. From Mr. Sartain's class she proceeded to paint her first successful picture, "The Last Days of Infancy," which received the Mary Smith Prize at the Philadelphia Academy in 1885, and was exhibited also in New York and at the Paris Salon. While abroad she visited Italy and England, receiving several commissions for portraits during a visit to Cambridge; and her second exhibit at the Paris Salon was also hung with honor. Her demonstration at the new Salon of the Champ de Mars in 1896, as we have seen, was highly appreciated. Of this critical Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts she is one of the very few women Associées. In her native city she has been four times awarded the Mary Smith prize, for the best painting by a resident woman artist, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1885, 1887, 1891 and 1892, and in 1893 the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club. In the same year, 1893, she received the Dodge Prize at the New York National Academy of Design, and was elected a member of the Society of American Artists; in the following year she was made Associate of the National Academy. At the notable international exhibition of