Artist: Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942)
Medium: Oil & Charcoal on Board
Date: ca. 1890s
Provenance: Featured in The Century’s American Artists Series, September 1894
Collection: Gilder Palmer Family Archive

Price: $250,000 USD

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Description with Historical Context:
This masterful oil and charcoal portrait by Cecilia Beaux, one of the most celebrated American portraitists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, depicts Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), poet, reformer, and longtime editor of The Century Magazine.

By the 1890s, Beaux had risen to international prominence, often hailed as the female counterpart to John Singer Sargent. Her portraits of America’s intellectual elite embodied both elegance and depth, and her relationship with the Gilders placed her in close dialogue with New York’s artistic and literary circles.

Richard Watson Gilder himself was at the epicenter of the Gilded Age cultural renaissance. As editor of The Century Magazine, he shaped American tastes in art, literature, and social reform, publishing works by Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Henry James. Alongside his wife, Helena de Kay Gilder — a pioneering female artist and co-founder of both the Art Students League and the Society of American Artists — Richard helped define an era when art and literature became central to American civic life.

This portrait was not only featured in the September 1894 issue of The Century’s American Artists Series but also represented Beaux’s growing recognition as a painter who could rival European masters. The psychological presence she captured in Gilder — contemplative, poised, and visionary — reflects the man who championed progressive causes from abolition to women’s rights while also fostering the artistic legacies of La Farge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Winslow Homer, all close associates of the Gilder family.

To own this piece is to hold not only a masterwork of American portraiture but also a cultural artifact of the Gilded Age’s most influential artistic dynasty.

Historical Significance:

• Painted at the peak of Cecilia Beaux’s career, an artist who broke barriers for women in fine art.

• Subject: Richard Watson Gilder, key figure of the Gilded Age, reformer, poet, and editor.

• Ties to the Century Association, The Century Magazine, and America’s most prominent literary/artistic voices.

• Represents the fusion of art, literature, and social reform in late 19th-century New York.