 Cecile Smith (Marquise) De Wentworth is primarily known as Cecilia E Smith Wentworth
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Cecile Smith de Wentworth, a prominent academic portrait painter, was far better known in France than in her native America. Born in New York City to a Catholic family, she attended the Sacred Heart Convent and then went to Paris to study in the studio of the academic painter, Alexandre Cabanel. Sometime in the next few years she married Josiah Winslow Wentworth.
In 1889, "Mme. C. E. Wentworth" appeared for the first time in the exhibition catalogue of the Paris Salon. At the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900, she won a bronze medal for her portrait of Pope Leo XIII. The Pope decorated her with the title of Grand Commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher, and conferred on her the papal title of Marchesa. For the next thirty years, the Marquise de Wentworth exhibited portraits and religious subjects at the Paris Salon, winning many honors. In 1901, she was awarded the title of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and she also became an officier de linstruction publique.
Her best-known work is a portrait of Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican Museum in Rome; another of General John J. Pershing is now in the Versailles Museum. She also painted William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Queen Alexandra (wife of Edward VII) of England. The Luxembourg Museum bought her painting "La Foi" (shown in the 1893 Salon) where it is now in the new Paris museum of nineteenth century art, the Musee dOrsay. She was particularly noted for the alert, spontaneous expression of her sitters.
Although she maintained a studio at 15 Avenue des Champs Elysees in Paris throughout most of her career, the Marquise de Wentworth remained an American citizen. Impoverished after her husbands death in 1931, she moved to Nice on the Riviera. When she died in the Nice municipal hospital, the American embassy in Paris sent money to cover her funeral expenses.
(Information for the biography above is based on writings from the book, "American Women Artists", by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein.)
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Cecile De Wentworth is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exhibition 1915
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