WOMAN IN ART
Miss Beaux by Mr. Edwin Howland Blashfield, president of the National Academy of Design.
The gold medal presented to Miss Beaux has been conferred only twice before—in 1915 to Charles W. Elliot, D.D., L.L.D., President Emeritus of Harvard University; and in 1923 to Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer.
Friendship is one of the choice blessings of life, but in these days of hurry and worry there is scant time for the cultivation of real friendship. Congenial souls meet at times, but circumstances often prevent a continuance of social or written intercourse—such as existed in the days of our mothers. However, we occasionally find such friends well met, proving that friendship is not wholly a vanished blessing.
Some years ago a group of young women were students together in Paris. A sincere attachment grew into a lasting friendship, though distance and circumstances kept them mostly apart. But they had the experiences and memories of delightful days together, all of which enriched and sweetened life. The three friends might be treated here as merely three art students, but the rarity of such a tie as theirs seems like an oasis in the impersonal, tumultuous imperatives of the now.
Lucy Scarborough Conant was one of the group. Her father was Albert Conant of Vermont, engineer and artist, her mother Catherine Scarborough of Connecticut. From both she inherited gifts that were a forecast of a full life.
Her two friends were Cecilia Beaux and Florence Este. A vital, vivid trio.
Lucy Conant possessed a magnetic power for friendship, and psychologically that magnetism entered into the development and workings of her mental equipment. She studied vigorously with Lazar, René Menard, Jean Paul Laurenze, and from all she gathered knowledge for the activities of art that she was soon to meet. She did not wait to meet anything. Her energy propelled her talents into action whatever they were, and they were many.
Her gift of language was most unusual and most useful. Seemingly she did not have to belabor a Dutch grammar in order to make the boatman on the Maas know her meaning, nor dig up Latin roots whereby to get needed information in any derivative tongue—any language needed "she picked up and used at once." Her French was luscious as though she had been born in Paris. Her Irish brogue was irresistible. Her Italian flowed with all the velvet warmth and color of those olive-skinned folk of the Sicilian hills she had grown to love so well.
Even when on a sketching trip with Miss Beaux on the St. Lawrence River, she "picked up" the patois of Canadian French, like a native. Lucy Conant had a
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