Cecilia Beaux

In 1888 Cecilia Beaux turned down more than one marriage proposal and left Philadelphia for nineteen months of study in Paris, a decision that shaped the rest of her life. She had already drawn notice at home with a portrait of her sister and nephew, but she wanted the training the city offered and the freedom to work without a household to run.

Back in the United States she became, by the late 1890s, the portraitist wealthy Americans turned to when they could not get John Singer Sargent, the reigning society painter of the day. Critics called her the greatest woman painter alive, a phrase that says as much about their assumptions as about her brush. Her canvases have Sargent's fluent, loaded strokes and a cooler, watchful eye on the sitter.

In 1895 the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts made her its first full-time woman instructor, and she taught there for twenty years. She kept painting into old age at her summer house on the coast of Massachusetts, and died in 1942, still living by the working life she had chosen over marriage more than fifty years before.