Interpretive Resource

In the dual portrait Dorothea and Francesca, Cecilia Beaux painted the eldest daughters of her friend Richard Watson Gilder with fond familiarity. Beaux had met Gilder, a poet and the editor of Century Magazine, and his wife, Helena, in Paris in 1896. Their friendship deepened after Beaux returned to the United States and moved from her native Philadelphia to New York City, where the Gilders regularly hosted events for the arts community in their apartment on Fifteenth Street, which was nicknamed "The Studio." The Gilders became a second family to Beaux, and in the fall of 1898, while visiting them at their farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts, she painted this affectionate portrait of sixteen-year-old Dorothea patiently teaching her little sister Francesca a dance.

The subject’s thoroughly spontaneous appearance resulted from the artist’s careful control of her composition and her models. Beaux set up a studio in a converted tobacco barn on the farm’s grounds, building a platform on the bare earth floor to facilitate the girls’ natural movements. Several preparatory sketches preceded Beaux’s work on the large-scale canvas, and she regularly had the sisters pose separately, using a wooden brace to position accurately the hand that would be held by the absent figure in the final image. The sumptuous sheen of the girls’ dresses—warm white tinged with a shimmer of rosy pink—sets off their delicate complexions against their dark hair and the deeply shadowed background. Like John Singer Sargent, Beaux employed tonal contrasts and bravura brushwork to attain in her fashionable portraits a confident but casual elegance, prompting William Merritt Chase in 1899 to praise her as "not only the greatest living woman painter but the best that has ever lived."