Artwork Title: Les deniers jours d’enfance (The Last Days of Infancy)

Les deniers jours d’enfance (The Last Days of Infancy), 1885

Cecilia Beaux

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was born in Philadelphia, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy, and eventually became its first female faculty member. Despite her lack of formal education, she studied hard to learn to draw and paint, taking drawing lessons from her aunt as early as age 8 and studying locally while avoiding Eakins, whom she feared might dominate her. She was always a loner. Beaux completed her first important oil in 1885, when she was already aged 30. In that year she made her professional debut with the painting Les deniers jours d’enfance (The Last Days of Infancy), and got more good notices when it was shown at the Paris Salon two years later. She never looked back. The painting shows her older sister with her little boy. Unlike Whistler’s Mother, on which it is based, the two subjects are not shown in profile, as if for the ages. Rather, the mother looks down at the child whom she holds sprawling in her lap, and the child looks not at her but elsewhere, as if tolerating the parental embrace while plotting his escape. The painting captures the mixed emotions both experience on the cusp of the child’s separation from his mother. (http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/karlins/karlins4-10-08.asp) The Last Days of Infancy (Les Derniers Jours d’Enfance) (1883-85) is a portrait of her sister (Etta Beaux Drinker) and her son Henry, which won the Mary Smith Prize in 1885, and was exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1887. (https://eclecticlight.co/2016/10/03/into-the-light-cecilia-beauxs-perceptive-portraits-1-to-1898/)
Uploaded on Jun 10, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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