Financial help for John Leavitt and his family materialised in the form of a foreigner, Jean Adolph Beaux. With the help of friends, they were soon socially accepted. A Little Girl (Fanny Travis Cochran), by Cecilia Beaux (1887)Ĭecilia and Eliza moved from the family home in New York to Philadelphia around 1848 where they had distant relatives. As she put it, they were dreamers and not doers! As is often the case when one is subjected to financial pressure, John Leavitt’s health took a turn for the worse and his wife had to take over the running of the house and manage the family finances. It is noted in Cecilia Beaux’s autobiography Background with Figures, that the sons were of little help. Cecilia worked as a music teacher and Eliza worked as a governess. Their two eldest daughters, Cecilia (the mother of Cecilia Beaux) and Eliza had to go out to work to help with the family finances. The Leavitt family owed their creditors so much money they had to sell their New York town house and their country estate on the Palisades in Hoboken and John and Cecilia Kent Leavitt were forced to move to a small house in a “rough” suburb. However, the good times ended abruptly in 1846 with problems in the cotton industry and debts that could not be serviced, and the company filed for bankruptcy. John Wheeler Leavitt by Cecilia Beaux (1885) Cecilia Beaux’s maternal grandmother. The children were all home-tutored in all the academic subjects and taught to play the piano at which the second youngest, Eliza became a brilliant musician. He and his wife had eight children and as the saying goes “money was no object” for this family. & Rufus Leavitt Company, and was one of the most prominent businessmen of his age.
John was a prosperous textile merchant who founded the New York based family firm John W. Their ancestral history could be traced Cecilia Kent Leavittīack to seventeenth-century New England and before that to England. John and Cecilia were both born in the last decade of the eighteenth century and were married in 1820. This initial blog looks on her life before she became a professional painter but maybe to understand her better, one must understand the trials and tribulations of her early life and one has also to go back to the turn of the eighteenth century and her maternal grandparents John Wheeler Leavitt and his wife Cecilia Kent Leavitt. She is the nineteenth century American society portrait painter, Cecilia Beaux (née Leavitt). She is a painter as Velasquez and Rembrandt were, and like them, she infuses the subtle quality of life into her work…” John Wheeler Leavitt “… the greatest woman painter that had ever lived…. Of her, the American painter, William Merritt Chase said:
My featured artist today is looked upon as one of the greatest portrait painters of her time. Portrait of Cecilia Beaux by John Lambert (1905)
0 kommentar(er)
