Brother and Sister: Charles Sumner Bird and His Sister Edith Bird (Mrs. Robert Bass)

In 1907 Edith Bird was about 20 and her brother Charles 23, children of a paper fortune from East Walpole, south of Boston, where the family estate had polo grounds, stables and fields for the hunt. Cecilia Beaux dressed them for that life. He wears a riding coat, breeches and boots, and she holds a riding crop, in a white jacket and dark skirt. Beaux painted them in her summer studio at Gloucester, on the Massachusetts coast, and looked down on them from a raised viewpoint, so the pair stand out against a gleaming floor and a dim, loosely brushed room, an odd indoor setting for two people who lived outdoors. Five years later the family was deep in politics. In 1912 their father ran for governor of Massachusetts for Theodore Roosevelt's new Progressive Party, and that same year Edith married Robert Bass, then governor of New Hampshire and another Roosevelt supporter. The canvas stayed with the Birds for more than 70 years, until Charles's widow, Julia Appleton Bird, gave it to the museum in 1981.