TitleMiss Gilder
Artist
Cecilia Beaux
(American, 1855 - 1942)
Date1902
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 26 1/2 × 18 1/4 in.
Framed: 32 5/8 × 24 3/4 × 3 3/4 in.
SignedSigned lower left: "Cecilia Beaux"
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, May 13, 1903
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number68-P
Label TextWhen Beaux began spending time in New York in the mid 1890s, she became intimate with the family of Richard Watson and Helena de Kay Gilder. She often stayed in their East Eighth Street and Gramercy Park residences and spent several summers at Four Brooks, the Gilder farm at Tyringham Valley, in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. Through this couple, the artist met such luminaries as Henry James, John La Farge, Leila Mechlin, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Mark Twain. Warm friendships developed between Beaux and the Gilder daughters, Dorothea, Francesca, and Rosamund. The girls often served as her models, appearing in celebrated works such as The Dancing Lesson (1899-1900, Art Institute of Chicago).The Academy's unfinished study of Francesca (later Mrs. Walter Palmer, wife of a Columbia University professor of medicine) was possibly painted in October 1901, when she visited the artist in Lenox, Massachusetts. She was then nearly thirteen years old. Beaux offered the painting (then the property of the sitter's mother) as her provisional diploma presentation on May 4, 1903, promising to replace it in the future. A substitution was never made.
