Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.

Beaux was trained in Philadelphia and went on to study in Paris where she was influenced by academic artists Tony Robert-Fleury and William-Adolphe Bouguereau as well as the work of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas.

Beaux was awarded a gold medal for lifetime achievement by the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and honored by Eleanor Roosevelt as "the American woman who had made the greatest contribution to the culture of the world".

Her mother was the daughter of prominent businessman John Wheeler Leavitt of New York City and his wife, Cecilia Kent of Suffield, Connecticut.

[5][6] Her father, unable to bear the grief of his loss, and feeling adrift in a foreign country, returned to his native France for 16 years, with only one visit back to Philadelphia.

Though fascinated by the narrative elements of some of the pictures, particularly the Biblical themes of the massive paintings of Benjamin West, at this point Beaux had no aspirations of becoming an artist.

[14] At age 16, Beaux began art lessons with a relative, Catherine Ann Drinker, an accomplished artist who had her own studio and a growing clientele.

She then studied for two years with the painter Francis Adolf Van der Wielen, who offered lessons in perspective and drawing from casts during the time that the new Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts was under construction.

Given the bias of the Victorian age, female students were denied direct study in anatomy and could not attend drawing classes with live models (who were often prostitutes) until a decade later.

[16] Beaux demonstrated accuracy and patience as a scientific illustrator, creating drawings of fossils for Edward Drinker Cope, for a multi-volume report sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey.

His progressive teaching philosophy, focused on anatomy and live study and allowed the female students to partake in segregated studios, eventually led to his firing as director of the academy.

She was well suited to the precise work but later wrote, "this was the lowest depth I ever reached in commercial art, and although it was a period when youth and romance were in their first attendance on me, I remember it with gloom and record it with shame.

"[23] She studied privately with William Sartain, a friend of Eakins and a New York artist invited to Philadelphia to teach a group of art students, starting in 1881.

Though Beaux admired Eakins more and thought his painting skill superior to Sartain's, she preferred the latter's gentle teaching style which promoted no particular aesthetic approach.

[24] Beaux attended Sartain's classes for two years, then rented her own studio and shared it with a group of women artists who hired a live model and continued without an instructor.

"[30] Though advised regularly of Beaux's progress abroad and to "not be worried about any indiscretions of ours", her Aunt Eliza repeatedly reminded her niece to avoid the temptations of Paris, "Remember you are first of all a Christian – then a woman and last of all an Artist.

"[31] When Beaux arrived in Paris, the Impressionists, a group of artists who had begun their own series of independent exhibitions from the official Salon in 1874, were beginning to lose their solidarity.

Also known as the "Independents" or "Intransigents", the group which at times included Degas, Monet, Sisley, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Renoir, and Berthe Morisot, had been receiving the wrath of the critics for several years.

Her European training did influence her palette, however, and she adopted more white and paler coloration in her oil painting, particularly in depicting female subjects, an approach favored by Sargent as well.

[34] Back in the United States in 1889, Beaux proceeded to paint portraits in the grand manner, taking as her subjects members of her sister's family and of Philadelphia's elite.

[35] She resumed life with her family, and they supported her fully, acknowledging her chosen path and demanding of her little in the way of household responsibilities, "I was never once asked to do an errand in town, some bit of shopping…so well did they understand.

[37] In 1890 she exhibited at the Paris Exposition, obtained in 1893 the gold medal of the Philadelphia Art Club, and also the Dodge prize at the New York National Academy of Design.

[43] Another highly regarded portrait from that period is New England Woman (1895), a nearly all-white oil painting which was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In 1895, Beaux became the first woman to have a regular teaching position at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she instructed in portrait drawing and painting for the next twenty years.

[44] That rare type of achievement by a woman prompted one local newspaper to state, "It is a legitimate source of pride to Philadelphia that one of its most cherished institutions has made this innovation."

Influential French critic M. Henri Rochefort commented, "I am compelled to admit, not without some chagrin, that not one of our female artists…is strong enough to compete with the lady who has given us this year the portrait of Dr. Grier.

[50][51] By 1900 the demand for Beaux's work brought clients from Washington, D.C., to Boston, prompting the artist to move to New York City, where she spent the winters, while summering at Green Alley, the home and studio she had built in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

She also sketched President Teddy Roosevelt during her White House visits in 1902, during which "He sat for two hours, talking most of the time, reciting Kipling, and reading scraps of Browning.

"[57] While Beaux stuck to her portraits of the elite, American art was advancing into urban and social subject matter, led by artists such as Robert Henri who espoused a totally different aesthetic, "Work with great speed..Have your energies alert, up and active.

[58] The clash of Henri and William Merritt Chase (representing Beaux and the traditional art establishment) resulted in 1907 in the independent exhibition by the urban realists known as "The Eight" or the Ashcan School.