Man with the Cat by Cecilia Beaux

Henry Sturgis Drinker and Cecilia Beaux had a complicated history but that didn’t get in the way of Cecilia making him the subject of one of her best portraits. 

In today’s episode, we’ll find out how Henry was just one example of the lengths this renowned Gilded Age artist went to pursue her dream of an art career. And how her talent, hard work–and the help of a good friend–got her started. 

Here’s the portrait of Cecilia’s sister Etta and son Henry I mentioned.

SHOW NOTES
If you want to zoom in and pan around, you can find it here on the Museum’s website.

“A Long Look” themes are “Easy” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/2QGe6skVzSs and “At the Cafe with You” by Onion All Stars https://pixabay.com/users/onion_all_stars-33331904/

Episode music
“Preludes, Op. 28 – No. 21 ‘Sunday’” by Frédéric Chopin
Courtesy of the European Archive and musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/82-preludes-op-28/

“Preludes, Op. 28 – No. 17 ‘Scene on the Place de Notre-Dame’” by Frédéric Chopin
Performed by Ivan Ilic. Courtesy of musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/82-preludes-op-28/

“String Quartet no. 12 in F major ‘American’, Op. 96” by Antonín Dvořák. 
Courtesy of the European Archive and musopen.org
https://musopen.org/music/4887-string-quartet-no-12-in-f-major-american-op-96/

Artwork information
https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/man-cat-henry-sturgis-drinker-1635

Les Dernier Jours d’Enfance
https://www.pafa.org/museum/collection/item/les-derniers-jours-d-enfance

Cecilia bio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Beaux#cite_ref-16

“Cecilia Beaux: A Modern Painter in the Gilded Age” by Alice A. Carter. 
https://archive.org/details/ceciliabeauxmode0000cart

“Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter” by Sylvia Yount.  
https://archive.org/details/ceciliabeauxamer00beau

Henry Sturgis Drinker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sturgis_Drinker

TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to A Long Look! I’m your host, Karen Jackson

Did you know most people spend only a few seconds looking at works of art? But what happens if you slow down and take a long look? Join me while I take you thru the experience of what I see and discover while looking at art for minutes instead of seconds. Then I’ll share the history, mystery, or controversy behind it!

Ready? Then let’s head to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC

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Today I’m looking at Man with the Cat (Henry Sturgis Drinker) by Cecilia Beaux

If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/henry. When you get there, just click on the image to zoom in and pan around! 

So what do you first notice?

The impressive grey mustache of a tall, thin man in his late 40s who sits looking at us with dark eyes. He wears a cream-colored suit with a petal pink shirt and black tie. His short black hair is grey at the temples and waves along his high pale forehead.  

That moustache spreads under his thin nose and kind of billows out into puffy sideburns on his narrow cheeks. 

He faces us with his legs crossed and body angled a little to our left and almost fills this painting that’s about 4 ft tall by 3 ft wide. It’s hung so that he’s looking down at us a little.

Henry leans back into a black Windsor chair with a curved spindle back and narrow armrests that wrap around him. His left arm on our right is propped on the right armrest and the long fingers of that hand lie next to a sleepy tawny gold and white cat stretched across his lap. Its green eyes are half closed but its are ears pricked up.   

They’re sitting next to open shutters on our left with cool light pouring in that illuminates Henry from the waist up and creates deep shadows on the right side of his face and in the folds and creases of his suit.

One detail Beaux included that I love is painting his right ear a kind of dark glowing pink, which is exactly how it would look with light coming through it!  

The shutters are white wood but the rest of the room is indistinct at first. There are wide vertical and horizontal strokes of blue grey, taupe, sage green, and white behind Henry that suggest a wall and floor and another set of open shutters in the back corner.

And lumpy caramel-brown and tan objects behind Henry and the cat on our right appear to be a fluffy throw pillow with orange stripes sitting in the corner of an armchair. 

The whole scene is very loosely painted except for Henry’s face which is smoother, more detailed. He looks serious, which is typical for a formal portrait at this time but there’s something else in his expression. His deep set eyes are in shadow and something about his gaze looks guarded or wistful.

MUSIC

That gaze may have to do with the artist, his sister-in-law Cecilia Beaux. When this was painted in 1898 Cecilia had become one of the leading portrait painters of the Gilded Age, right up there with John Singer Sargent. She was even called the greatest living women painter by William Merritt Chase, another top artist of the day.   

Henry was married to her sister Etta, but years before he had proposed to Cecilia who turned him down. Cecilia had made the choice to put her art first, and refused to marry. It wasn’t just poor Henry’s heart she broke, she left a trail of broken hearts behind but she just knew this what she had to do to have the independent life she wanted.

Cecilia was born in 1855 and she and Etta who was a little older, ended up being raised by her mother’s family, the Leavitts in Philly. Grandma Leavitt and Aunts Emily and Eliza provided a loving home where the girls learned the value of hard work, perseverance, and how to be self-reliant as well as a love for art and music. 

Cecilia began painting when she was 16 and her first teacher was actually Henry’s sister, Catherine. 

She spent her early years trying out different approaches to art. First as a lithographer, then as a scientific illustrator drawing fossils for the US Geological Survey. But even though she was good at these, she hated the persnickity detailed work they required saying it give her a pain in her “solar plexus…”  which basically means, a stomach ache. 

When she hit her 20s, Cecilia decided to study at the prestigious PA Academy of Fine Arts in Philly.  From there she moved on to private lessons with an artist named William Sartain and this is when portraiture really became her thing. 

She started by painting portraits of her family, one of which became her breakthrough work, a really lovely scene of Etta with her 3 year old son Harry called “Les Dernier Jours d’Enfance,” which means The End of Childhood. Etta is shown sitting facing our left cuddling little Harry who’s sprawled in her lap. I’ll Include a link in the show notes. 

It was given the award for best painting by a female artist at the annual exhibition at the Academy and her career took off. 

Now, at this time, art was considered an acceptable career for young women, as long as it didn’t involve painting nudes! And it was viewed as a useful way to spend time until they got married and started a family. The art career was expected to end at that point. For C, that just wouldn’t do. She was determined to be taken seriously and be successful at the work she loved and that’s why she refused to marry.    

Portraits became her specialty and Cecilia had great timing, because she was getting into them just as the Gilded Age was underway and by her early 30s, she was getting commissions from wealthy and influential Philadelphians. More importantly she was getting paid as much as some of her male colleagues, like Thomas Eakins.

MUSIC 

By 32, her work was really in demand but she wanted to improve her skills even more. So she went to study in Paris for a year. Cecilia was already known there because she had done the improbable and won a place in the very prestigious Paris Salon a year before. 

The story goes her friend Margaret insisted she submit the portrait of Etta and little Harry to the Salon. Now getting into the Salon was a major deal for an artist. If you’ve heard of Art Basel or any other big art fairs, this was the granddaddy! And Cecilia was just some random American woman painter! Margaret was such a good friend she packed the painting up, took it with her and even hauled it around Paris to get it entered. Let’s it for Margaret! 

Paris was another of Cecilia’s groundbreaking decisions. Most artists when there when they were young. But Cecilia believed it was worth going despite her age and basically giving up her income. She really believed time spent at the French academies would help her become an even better artist and the contacts she’d make would help professionally. 

It was the right call. When she got back, she settled into a long, successful career first in Philly, then NY and eventually in Gloucester MA. The wealthy and powerful came to her to be immortalized, including the First Family, Edith and Ethel Roosevelt. And she became the first woman instructor at her alma mater, the PA Academy of Fine Arts.

MUSIC

Now a little about Henry… 

Henry Sturgis Drinker came from a Philly Quaker family and was born in Hong Kong where the family lived for their father’s business. The family moved back to Baltimore after the father died and Henry eventually graduated from Lehigh University with an engineering degree. He went to work for the Lehigh Valley Railroad and then went on to get his law degree and served as general solicitor for the company. 

Things turned out ok for Henry. He and Etta had six children, some of whom Cecilia painted and eventually he became president of Lehigh University. 

OUTRO:
I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in your favorite app. 

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Thanks for joining me!