Brooks ignored contemporary artistic trends such as Cubism and Fauvism, drawing on her own original aesthetic inspired by the works of Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and James McNeill Whistler.

According to her memoir, when she was seven, her mother fostered her to a poor family living in a New York City tenement, then disappeared and stopped making the agreed-upon payments.

[4] After the foster family located her grandfather, he arranged to send Beatrice to study for several years at St. Mary's Hall[5] (now Doane Academy) an Episcopal girls boarding school in Burlington, New Jersey.

Later, she attended a convent school, in between times spent with her mother, who moved around Europe constantly, although the stress of travel made St. Mar harder to control.

[4] She extracted a meager allowance from her mother, took voice lessons, and for a time sang in a cabaret, before finding out she was pregnant and delivering a baby girl on February 17, 1897.

When a fellow student left a book open on her stool with pornographic passages underlined, she picked it up and hit him in the face with it, but he and his friends stalked her.

They quarreled almost immediately when she cut her hair and ordered men's clothes for a planned walking tour of England; he refused to be seen in public with her dressed that way.

When a group of local artists asked her to give an informal show of her work, she displayed only some pieces of cardboard on which she had dabbed her experiments with gray paint.

In contrast, Brooks took an apartment in the fashionable 16th arrondissement, mingled in elite social circles, and painted portraits of wealthy and titled women.

The paintings were generally naturalistic, showing an attentive eye for the details of Belle Époque fashion, with parasols, veils, and elaborate bonnets on display.

Her emaciated stature and forlorn expression led one contemporary reviewer to refer to her as a consumptive; Brooks described her simply as "a poor girl who was cold".

Unlike the women in those paintings, the subject of White Azaleas looks away from the viewer; in the background above her is a series of Japanese prints which Brooks loved.

She saw him as a martyred artist, another lapidé; he wrote poems based on her works and called her "the most profound and wise orchestrator of grays in modern painting".

In The Crossing (also exhibited as The Dead Woman), Rubinstein appears to be in a coma, stretched out on a white bed or bier against a black void variously interpreted as death or floating in spent sexual satisfaction on Brooks' symbolic wing;[3] in Spring, she is depicted as a pagan Madonna strewing flowers on the ground in a grassy meadow.

It was exhibited along with a poem by D'Annunzio calling for courage and resolution in wartime, and later reproduced in a booklet sold to raise funds for the Red Cross.

During the Paris Peace Conference, he led a group of nationalist irregulars who seized and held the city of Fiume to prevent Italy from ceding it to Croatia.

[3][27] On June 16, 2016, under the direction of Dr. Langer and Legion Group Arts, young Italian researcher Giovanni Rapazzini de Buzzaccarini discovered a long-lost early work by Brooks at the Vittoriale in Gardone.

Brooks had copied (Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci 1450–1523) Perugino's Portrait of a Young Man at the Uffizi when she was a penniless art student in Rome.

"[29] The longest and most important relationship of Brooks' life was her three-way partnership with Natalie Clifford Barney, an American-born writer, and Lily de Gramont, a French aristocrat.

After a brief dust-up that resulted in Barney's offering Gramont a marriage contract while at the same time refusing to give up Brooks, the three women formed a stable lifelong triangle in which none was a third wheel.

[39] Brooks' portrait shows Gluck in a starched white shirt, a silk tie, and a long black belted coat that she designed and had made by a "mad dressmaker";[40] her right hand, at her waist, holds a man's hat.

However, while many of Brooks' early paintings show sad and withdrawn figures "consumed by petticoats, veiled hats and other period trappings of femininity",[41] Gluck is self-possessed and quietly intense—an artist who insists on being taken seriously.

[48] Brooks also appeared in Compton Mackenzie's Extraordinary Women (1928), a novel about a group of lesbians on Capri during World War I, as the composer Olympia Leigh.

[51] In 1930, while laid up with a sprained leg, Brooks began a series of more than 100 drawings of humans, angels, demons, animals, and monsters, all formed out of continuous curved lines.

In a 1965 letter, she cautioned Barney not to lie down on the benches in her garden, lest the plants feed on her life force: "Trees especially are our enemies and would suck us dry.

[3][8] The most widely observed influence on Brooks's painting is that of James McNeill Whistler, whose subdued palette probably inspired her to adopt a monotone color scheme with accents of tinted pigments because through this technique she could suggest a classical restraint and create tensions that were modulated by shape, texture, and variations of shading throughout her canvases.

While the poses are almost identical, Brooks removes the little girl and all the details of Whistler's domestic scene, leaving only Borgatti and her piano—an image of an artist completely focused on her art.

[70] Critics have described her portraits of the 1920s as a "sly celebration of gender-bending as a kind of heroic act"[41] and as creating "the first visible Sapphic stars in the history of modernism.

Brooks painted de Wolfe porcelain-pale, in an off-white dress and a bonnet resembling a shower cap; a white ceramic goat placed on a table at her elbow seems to mimic her simpering expression.

[75] Art critic Michael Duncan sees the painting as making fun of Troubridge's "dandified appearance", while for Meryle Secrest it is "a tour de force of ironic commentary".