Cecilia Beaux (American, 1855-1942) Portrait of Helena Dorothea McGrew

Description:

Cecilia Beaux (American, 1855-1942)

Portrait of Helena Dorothea McGrew
Dedicated and signed "To Helena Dorothea McGrew Cecilia Beaux" l.l.
Oil on canvas, 24 1/2 x 18 1/4 in. (62.2 x 46.3 cm),framed.
Condition: Repaired tears, retouch, surface grime.

N.B. As editors, literary critics, socially well-connected artists, and reformers, the Gilder and de Kay families held powerful positions in New York City art, literary, and political circles of the late nineteenth century. While Jeanette and William Gilder, and Charles de Kay contributed to the city’s literary and artistic life, the more felicitous alliance was that of their respective siblings, Century magazine editor, Richard Watson Gilder, and Cooper Union trained artist Helena de Kay Gilder. Arbiters of aesthetic and literary taste in the late nineteenth century, the salons they hosted in their Stanford White renovated home drew a variety of interesting and distinguished artists, writers, musicians, architects, theater people, and politicians. Among their friends were Augustus Saint Gaudens, Mark Twain, Madame Modjeska, Joseph Jefferson, Emma Calve, and Grover and Frances Cleveland. Gilder, through the Century, published articles, essays, short stories, poetry, and art work that highlighted the breadth of the Gilded Age American scene, and nearly every important artist and author found their work reproduced and their writings printed there. Among the anointed was Philadelphia-born portraitist Cecilia Beaux whose art work and poetry were regularly published in the Century. Introduced to Richard and Helena Gilders in the early 1890s by Catharine and Thomas Janvier, Beaux’s first art teacher and her journalist husband, the Gilders soon became a second family for Beaux. By the mid-1890s she was traveling in Europe with them and making regular summer visits to Four Brooks, their comfortable Berkshires farm. The sketch of young George Gilder playing his violin (lot 358) was executed at Four Brooks in 1897. This drawing was one of the earliest portraits that Beaux completed for the family, and over the next twenty-five years she rendered nearly twenty more. When Beaux moved to New York City in the late 1890s, she settled within walking distance of the Gilder home. Beaux was particularly fond of their eldest daughter, Dorothea, whose beautiful features she first captured in an oil sketch in 1896. Shortly after the turn-of-the-century, on a visit to Beaux at Green Alley, the artist’s summer home and studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Dorothea Gilder met Dallas McGrew, the striking Harvard-trained architect who had designed and built the artist’s summer compound. Dorothea and Dallas were married in 1916, and three years later, when their young daughter, Helena Dorothea McGrew, was just two years old, Beaux made an oil sketch of her for her parents. Some twenty years later, when Helena McGrew set out to make her own way in the world, she settled into a New York City apartment in the same building as Cecilia Beaux.

We are grateful to Dr. Tara Leigh Tappert for this catalog essay.
Estimate $25,000-35,000

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