Portrait of Harriet Sears Amory

Along with John Singer Sargent and William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux was one of the leading portraitists in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Chase praised her as “not only the greatest living woman painter, but the best that has ever lived.”

Beaux won acclaim for her grand-manner portraits of the social and intellectual elite, executed with the bravura brushstrokes and heavy impasto of Impressionism, as seen in her depiction of five-year-old Harriet Sears Amory. The portrait shares a particular affinity, in both style and subject, with Sargent’s portrait of the young Helen Sears painted eight years earlier and now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Both Harriet’s kimono and the bonsai evergreen behind her attest to the keen interest in Japanese aesthetics among privileged Bostonians.