Already an accomplished painter when she arrived in Paris for further training at age33, Cecilia Beaux quickly distinguished herself with bravura works such as this: a collaborative portrait of fellow Philadelphia 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.” (https://vmfa.museum/collections/art/alexander-harrison_2009-2/)