Audrey Jones Beck
[2] She lived in Washington, D.C., with her grandparents for part of her childhood, where Jesse Jones served as United States secretary of commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
"[1] According to Beck, she first encountered impressionism when she visited Europe as a 16-year-old, and that while she "paid homage to the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo [...] the imaginative and colorful Impressionist paintings came as a total surprise."
She noted the relative scarcity of impressionist art in American museums during those years, and called the paintings the "epitome of artistic freedom" and a "visual delight".
[1] In 1960 she joined the board of Houston Endowment, a charitable foundation founded by her grandparents, where she was involved with causes such as annual scholarship programs and animal welfare.
[1] The Becks bought a cottage, sometimes referred to as the "Hansel and Gretel" house, from Joseph Strauss (Golden Gate Bridge architect) on Belvedere Island, California, just north of San Francisco in 1965.
Although John died a few years later, for rest of her life, Audrey Beck escaped the oppressive summer heat of Texas and the gulf coast humidity of Houston at the cottage, overlooking San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Mount Tamalpais.
It houses 158,150 ft² (14,693 m²) of galleries for the museum's permanent collection of antiquities, European painting and sculpture to 1900, American art, as well as temporary exhibitions.
"The roof becomes the most characteristic image of the museum, showing the importance given to the light, the real protagonist of an architecture whose substance is found in the interior space.
[9][10] Artist and art movements in the Beck collection include representative examples of realist and en plein air painters such as Eugène Boudin, and Honoré Daumier.
Impressionist painters include Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and others.
A gallery of neo-impressionism (pointillism) exhibits the paintings of Henri-Edmond Cross, Maximilien Luce, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and several other members of the movement.
The Fauvist collection is near encyclopedic, including paintings by Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and more.
She aspired to assemble a representative collection of the era, exhibiting the full depth and scope of the period to people who knew little about art and impressionism.
It is located in the River Oaks area of Houston and privately situated at the back of the lot behind trees, and not easily viewed from the street.
