Adapted from the Book by Sylvia Yount, Cecilia Beaux: American Figure Painter
Published by University of California Press (August 1, 2007)
An Essay By Mark Bockrath Pages 84-102
Despite our modern preference for unglazed oil paintings, it is not unusual to see paintings by Beaux in frames that retain their original picture glass. Glass afforded paintings a modicum of protection at a time of dirty gaslights and coal heat and when packing and shipping procedures were far from ideal. Pasting paper to the surface of the glass while the painting was in transit prevented jagged pieces of glass from piercing the canvas in the event of breakage. Sometimes the sheets of glass were sent along with the framed painting in separate packaging, to be reassembled after delivery.
Photographs of paintings installed in the annual exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts show many examples of paintings by Beaux and her contemporaries with glazed frames. A lender shipping one of Beaux’s paintings to an Academy annual asked the institution’s managing director, Harrison Morris, for advice on the subject of glazing: “I do not wish to make any suggestions as to sending without glass and I suppose Miss Beaux thinks that it is better covered. Do you know?” In a letter of 1895 from Beaux to Morris, she chides him about replacing a sheet of cracked glass on one of her portraits in an annual exhibition. She wanted it replaced as soon as possible and reminded Morris that “Haseltine [Charles Haseltine’s Galleries, Philadelphia] is always ready to do a thing of that kind at a moment’s notice.”
In another letter to Morris, written in 1911, Beaux discusses sending a glazed painting to an annual. Beaux wrote from Gloucester in 1930 to instruct the Academy’s secretary to send her well-traveled and widely exhibited New England Woman (see fig. 80) for exhibition with glazing: “The picture had a glass which is a very important consideration—If the glass is now covering it—as I hope—(for protection) I trust it may be shipped with the picture or separately—as this is the only safe way.”
The glass was held in place in the frame by removable liners. Some glazing was set between the liner and the outer part of the frame, thereby covering the liner as an integral part of the frame construction. Examples of Beaux paintings in this study whose frames retain what appear to be their original glazing include Sally Stretch Keen (cat. 43), Mrs. George W. Childs Drexel (Mary Irick) (cat. 42, fig. 78), Travis Cochran (see fig. 74), Mrs. Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (see fig. 76), Catherine (Eddy) Beveridge—Lady Primrose Portrait, and Marion Reilly (see fig. 84).
