After the Meeting

Independent, unconventional, with a strong will and strong personality, American artist Cecilia Beaux carved out a successful career for herself as a society portraitist in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When she painted this work, she was winding down her tenure as the first woman instructor on the regular faculty of the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. The fashionably-dressed woman caught in mid-conversation is Dorothea Gilder, Beaux’s close friend and romantic partner and the daughter of Richard Watson Gilder, poet and editor of Century Magazine. The subject of the meeting referred to in the title is left to our imagination, though the Gilder household was noted for its lively gatherings of intellectuals. The painting is unusual for Beaux in its compositional devices influenced by the art of Japan. Japanese aesthetics had been fully absorbed into European art by the end of the 19th century. The cropping of objects, the oblique angle of the dominant figure, the contrasting patterns, and the relative flatness of major areas all take their cue from Japanese art, although After the Meeting stands at the end of japonisme in America.