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
Concurrent with Beaux’s use of Arts and Crafts frames, many examples of Rococo Revival designs are found on her portraits at the turn of the century. Some large frames Beaux used for full-length portraits in these years are of cast composition in the period version of Rococo Revival based on Louis XV models from the eighteenth century. The early Rococo Revival of the 1830s to 1850s produced some of the heaviest and most flamboyant of nineteenth-century frames. The later revival, as seen in Beaux’s frames, was lighter in feeling, with mostly unadorned coves and foliate tendrils in low relief or reeding along the upper edge of the frame members. Some of the later frames have straight sections between the corner and center cartouches rather than the swept cyma (reverse, or “S”) curves of true Rococo design, in a sort of conflation of French Régence and Rococo styles.
Rococo Revival frames were a conservative and elegant frame choice in the late 1890s and early 1900s; the English dealer Joseph Duveen framed many Old Master paintings and English portraits, sold to great collectors such as Henry Clay Frick, in high-quality, carved, contemporary interpretations of Louis XV designs. The style was particularly well suited to vertical figural compositions, especially when these compositions depict a sitter in a Rococo Revival interior with architectural elements and furnishings that echo the sweeping curves of the frame’s profile, as in Beaux’s Mrs. Larz Anderson (1900–1901; Anderson House, The Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.). The frame on the portrait of Mrs. Anderson is visible on the painting in an installation photograph of the One Hundredth Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1905.
The Rococo Revival frame on Mr. and Mrs. Anson Phelps Stokes of 1898 (cat. 58), constructed entirely of cast composition ornament on a molding of ogee profile, offers another fine example of this genre. The frame’s pierced outer rails visually lighten the great weight of the molding. Small cast flowers trail from corner and center cartouches that enclose shell designs. The gilding, over gray bole, is mostly matte throughout the frame’s surface, with burnishing reserved for a small central scotia molding. The seated, three-quarter-length portrait of Mrs. John Frederick Lewis of 1906 (fig. 81) is framed in a cast composition Rococo Revival frame with original bronze paint throughout much of its surface and burnished water-gilding over red bole on some of its moldings and on the highlights of cast motifs. Pierced cast composition cartouches with leaves and shells appear on the centers and corners of the frame.
This frame is shown on the painting in the installation photograph for the 102nd Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy in 1907. It bears a label on its reverse from the Art Gilding Company of 1312 Filbert Street in Philadelphia. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and Daughter Ethel (see fig. 10) and Sarah Elizabeth Doyle (cat. 63), both of 1902, are also in Rococo Revival frames.
