Interpretive Resource

In 1899 William Merritt Chase publicly praised Cecilia Beaux as "not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived." Painted in 1898, Dorothea and Francesca attests to Beaux’s prominence in the art of fashionable portraiture, a field dominated by John Singer Sargent, and her burgeoning interest in complex double-portrait compositions that display psychological depth and painterly bravura. The portrait depicts the two older of Richard Watson Gilder’s three daughters, Dorothea and Francesca.

Richard Watson Gilder, a poet and editor of the Century Magazine, was an eminent member of New York society. He and his wife Helena hosted many important events in their Fifteenth Street home, referred to as The Studio, including the inaugural meetings of the Society of American Artists, in 1877, and the Authors’ Club, in 1882. Cecilia Beaux met the Gilders in Paris in 1896 and became close to them after moving from her native Philadelphia to New York City. Beaux often painted members of the Gilder family, especially the sisters. In addition to the Art Institute’s work are, for example, Dorothea in the Woods (1897; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) and After the Meeting (1914; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio). In her autobiography, Beaux described painting Dorothea and Francesca in a converted tobacco barn at the Gilders’s farm, Four Brooks, in Tyringham, Massachusetts:

"The big and little sisters, Dorothea and Francesca, used to execute a dance of the simplest and all too circumscribed design, invented by themselves, and adorned by their unconscious beauty alone. This was the subject. I built a platform with my own hands, as the girls could not move easily on the bare earth. When it rained hard, in September, the orchard let its surplus water run down the hill and under the barn-sill, so that, as my corner was rather low, I put on rubber boots and splashed in and out of my puddle, four inches deep. October was difficult, for it grew bitterly cold. But valiant posing went on, though the scenic effect of the group was changed by wraps. Summer, indeed, was over, when on a dark autumnal night, in the freezing barn, the picture was packed by the light of one or two candles and a lantern."

Francesca Gilder Palmer recalled "very vividly ‘sitting’ or rather standing, for [Dorothea and Francesca] in Cecilia Beaux’s studio. . . . It was a rather fatiguing pose and I longed to be out in the fields, riding the farm horses . . . and otherwise pursuing the wonderful farm activities of the summer months." Rosamond Gilder, the youngest sister, remembers that her two sisters sometimes did not pose together, revealing the artifice of Beaux’s portrait: "My sister . . . Francesca . . . remembers very well standing in that pose holding a wooden structure the right height for her right hand while Beaux painted her figure. Of course they often stood together but when only one was available, dragged from the joys of riding or haying on the farm, the rack or stand was used."

Beaux’s staged scene of elegance is an exercise in refinement of both style and subject matter. Dorothea Gilder, sixteen years old in 1898, is shown patiently teaching her younger sister to dance. The two are compositionally connected by their gesture, gaze, and clasped hands. The younger girl’s tentative pose and intent downward gaze toward her outstretched foot echo her sister’s steady and graceful posture. Each mirrors the other; Francesca gives us a glimpse into Dorothea’s girlhood while Dorothea foreshadows Francesca’s adolescence. Beaux avoids sentimentality, however, by omitting contextual details and employing lively brushwork to focus on the mood conveyed by this elegant dance.

The painting was first exhibited in December 1898 at the National Academy of Design and earned the praise of critic Charles Caffin, who wrote: "the movement in the two figures is most charmingly expressed, and there is a refined vivacity running through the whole picture, which is painted with great freedom and breadth." This early praise is indicative of the acclaim the painting would generate through its lengthy exhibition history. Other commentators emphasized the gender connection between Beaux and her subjects. One noted, "only an artist who was in perfect sympathy with the ambitions of girlhood could have painted The Dancing Lesson. . . . These sisters . . . show the perfection of grace and naturalness."

The assertion that only a woman could have painted a "feminine" subject with such sensitivity to the proper deportment and behavior of upper-class young women reveals the lingering prejudice critics harbored toward women artists in the late nineteenth century. In many ways, however, Cecilia Beaux worked against the grain of gender expectations during her career. She never married, for she believed marriage might compromise her work; she aggressively pursued professional acclaim with an ambitious exhibition schedule; and she was the first female instructor appointed to the faculty at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, in 1895. Moreover, when she enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, she focused on the study of the human figure, which was then largely viewed as a male domain. Cecilia Beaux considered Dorothea and Francesca one of her finest compositions and chose to exhibit it frequently. The painting won the Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Medal at the Art Institute’s "Thirty-Fourth Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture" in 1921 and was immediately purchased by the Friends of American Art for the museum’s permanent collection.