THE Pennsylvania Magazine OHISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY

Editorial

N BEHALF OF THE Historical Society of Pennsylvania, it gives me

great pleasure to present this collection of essays on the work of Philadelphia's own Cecilia Beaux, an artist whose reputation was eclipsed far too long by the hegemony of modernism. I am grateful most of all to guest editors Tara Leigh Tappert and Cheryl Leibold who wrote and/or commissioned these essays and then edited and otherwise regularized them into a coherent package. Without their exhaustive work this delightful issue of PMHB would not have been possible. It has been my pleasure to have known Tara Leigh Tappert since 1988 when she was a visiting scholar at Winterthur Museum and Gardens and I was editor of Winterthur Portfolio. Even then, Tara was the expert on Cecilia Beaux. Quickly I came to admire and respect her work and since then have encouraged her efforts to make this important Philadelphia artist more widely known. Tara is an indefatigable researcher, she writes well, and she has great intellectual curiosity. Tara became the expert on Cecilia Beaux in the course of preparing her dissertation for George Washington University entitled "Choices-The Life and Career of Cecilia Beaux: A Professional Biography" (1990). In 1995 she curated an exhibition on Beaux at the National Portrait Gallery and wrote the accompanying catalogue entitled Cecilia Beaux and the Art of Portraiture.The catalogue was a modest affair that drew on only a small portion of the material gathered during the research for her dissertation. A little over two years ago, during a conversation with Tara, it became EDITORIAL

apparent that she was not alone in her interest in Cecilia Beaux. Other scholars had rediscovered Beaux too. Then too there was the recent gift to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of a major Beaux painting plus a collection of photographs and archival material. The next thing I knew I was offering to do a thematic issue of PMHB devoted exclusively to Beaux. Tara assured me that she and Cheryl Leibold, PAFA archivist, could come up with enough material for an issue. Tara and Cheryl drew up a list of potential contributors, contacted them, and commissioned this series of articles. Long-time readers of PMHB will no doubt be startled to find a four-color image on the cover-a first in the history of the magazine--an event not likely to be repeated soon. It is thoroughly appropriate given the contents of this issue, but it would not have been possible without the financial assistance of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which also provided a modest subsidy permitting us to use an exceptionally large number of halftone illustrations. In a learned journal that for much of its existence has been bereft of illustrations, it is a rare pleasure for the editors of PMHB to be in a position to offer such a varied collection of images-some staid, some startling-but all pertinent to the text they enhance and therefore contributing to this important chapter in the history of American art.

Ian M. G. Quimby