Musée No:379.007
Regular price £25.00The Dreamer - Cecilia Beaux
Artist/Engraver: Henry Wolf
Date:1894
Henry Wolf (1852–1916) was a French-born wood engraver who lived and worked in the United States during his most influential work period and until his death. He lived in Strasbourg and studied under Jacques Levy and exhibited in Paris. He Wolf moved to New York City in 1871. He was a gifted engraver and created wood engravings of the works of a wide array of artists: Frank Weston Benson, Cecilia Beaux, Howard Pyle, John Singer Sargent, Jan Vermeer, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Aimé Morot and Édouard Manet to name but a few. In the days before digital colour printing, engravings in magazines like Scribner's Magazine, Harper's Monthly, and Century Magazine, were the only way to show and promote the works of the artists. In 1896 he started engraving his own artwork. He exhibited over a hundred wood engravings at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. He was awarded the Exposition's Grand Prize in printmaking that year.
This is his engraving of Cecilia Beaux’s work “The Dreamer”, it features her friend Caroline Kilby Smith. The critics loved it and hailed the subject as a quintessential American girl. Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was an important American society painter, who is sadly little known now, at the time she was feted as one of the most skilful portraitists of her generation and had a very rich and elite clientele. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy in the late 1870s, and taught there in the 1890s, but claimed that her only important artistic training had been two years of private study under the painter William Sartain from 1881 to 1883. Beaux painted dozens of closely observed, touching portraits of women and children, for which she achieved wide fame. Later in her career, her sitters included a distinguished array of international figures.
