Page "Cecilia Beaux" Paragraph 13

When Beaux arrived in Paris, the Impressionists, a group of artists who had begun their own series of independent exhibitions from the official Salon in 1874, were beginning to lose their solidarity.

Also known as the " Independents " or " Intransigents ", the group which at times included Degas, Monet, Sisley, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot, had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years.

Their art, though varying in style and technique, was the antithesis of the type of Academic art in which Beaux was trained and of which her teacher William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a leading master.

In the summer of 1888, with classes in summer recess, Beaux worked in the fishing village of Concarneau with the American painters Alexander Harrison and Charles Lasar.

She tried applying the plein-air painting techniques used by the Impressionists to her own landscapes and portraiture, with little success.

Unlike her predecessor Mary Cassatt, who had arrived near the beginning of the Impressionist movement 15 years earlier and who had absorbed it, Beaux's artistic temperament, precise and true to observation, would not align with Impressionism and she remained a realist painter for the rest of her career, even as Cézanne, Matisse, Gauguin, and Picasso were beginning to take art into new directions.

Beaux mostly admired classic artists like Titian and Rembrandt.

Her European training did influence her palette, however, and she adopted more white and paler coloration in her oil painting, particularly in depicting female subjects, an approach favored by Sargent as well.