A. Piatt Andrew

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942)
1903
Oil on canvas
Gift of Red Roof Associates, 1991
Cape Ann Museum

The celebrated painter Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was a close friend to both Piatt Andrew and Sleeper. Her striking portrait of Andrew presents the Harvard professor in his academic robes, yet her subject defied ivory-tower stereotypes. Boasting matinee-idol good looks, profound charisma, and a passion for strenuous sports, Andrew led an adoring coterie that included a number of athletic younger men. Immediately drawn to Andrew himself, Sleeper bought land near the professor’s home in 1907. Shy and often unwell, the designer possessed none of the qualities of Andrew’s outdoorsy beaux; throughout the following decades he held Andrew’s attention, instead, with his ever- expanding home. 

The American painter Cecilia Beaux trained in the 1870s at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then under the direction of Thomas Eakins, and subsequently at the Académie Julian in Paris. Sometimes unfairly labeled “the female John Singer Sargent” for the similarities of their portrait style, Beaux won major juried prizes by the 1890s and in 1895 she became the first woman to join the faculty of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. 

A regular summer visitor to Gloucester beginning in the 1880s, Beaux built her home Green Alley on Eastern Point in 1906. A nearby neighbor and close friend of Piatt Andrew’s, she disguised their eighteen-year age gap by shaving eight years from her birthdate. Clearly drawn to handsome, unavailable gay men, the never-married Beaux was likely bisexual herself. (In 1906 she ended an intense, apparently romantic, five-year relationship with Dorothea Gilder, a woman twenty-seven years her junior). Her affection for Andrew could take playful forms, but it could also manifest itself in a less sympathetic light. After a 1908 visit with Andrew and Henry Davis Sleeper in New York, Beaux recorded in her diary that, however much she enjoyed seeing the men together, “I have to remember the one appalling FACT.”