Cecilia Beaux
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Cecilia would come close, but never marry. She became an artist by finding her talents through schooling. At one early point she painted childrens portraits on plates as a way to make money before becoming noticed. People thought it was wonderful but she felt that she was selling out and hated it. She eventually became so famous, she was requested to paint heads of state. She also participated in the Women's Pavilion at the 1894 World's Fair.

Ernesta married Harry S. Drinker, Jr. 1879 they had 6 children.  Kate Drinker and Catherine Ann Drinker who had her own art studio and married Thomas A. Janvier, were Harry's sisters, and good friends with the sisters.

Cecilia eventually settled during her later Years in the Glouchester/Cape Ann, Massachusetts area.  She died 9/12/42.
 
 

During the period of her life in which she was doing plate paintings of children's faces she wrote a poem which told how she felt at that period of time in her life: "Lost hope, lost courage, lost ambition,  What's left but shams of these to hide my true condition? Feigned peace and joy, feigned happy effort. False tongue, proclaiming, "Art's my comfort." Nought's left but bones, and stones and duty that's not pleasure,  But grinding, ceaseless toil, whose end's  The measure of the short web of life the Fates have spun me. What's this...I've uttered words of treason. What's lost? My time, my daylight, and my reason."

Until recently Tina Modotti's reputation was based on her personal 
association with Edward Weston, for whom she modeled during the 1920s. However, her sharply focused portraits, still-lifes, and abstract compositions, made in Mexico contemporaneously, show her to have been an accomplished photographer in her own right.  Modotti's work combines a sophisticated sense of design with socially and politically oriented subject 
matter. Her images of the Mexican working classes and Mexican artifacts 
became powerful revolutionary emblems.

Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti was born in Undine, Italy. She was educated at schools in Italy and Austria.  From 1908 to 1913 she worked in an Undine textile factory. Joining her father in San Francisco, she worked in a silk factory from 1913 to 1914 and as a freelance dressmaker from 1914 to 1917.

Modotti married poet and painter Roubaix (Robo) de l'Abrie Richey in 1917. She worked as an actress in several Hollywood films in 1920 and 1921 and began to model and study photography in San Francisco with Edward Weston at that time.  Modotti's husband died in Mexico City in 1922.  She and Weston  had an intimate relationship of mutual influence, working together regularly from 1922 to 1930 in San Francisco and in Mexico, where they had studios in Tacubaya and Mexico City.

Modotti became a revolutionary activist in the early 1920s and developed strong ties with members of the Mexican Artists Union group, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Diego Rivera, Charlot, Orozco, and Siqueiros. She became a member of the Mexican Communist Party in 1927. She was a contributing editor and photographer for Mexican Folkways magazine from 
1927 to 1930, photographing murals and other works of art.

Modotti began an affair with Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella in 1928. She was accused but found innocent of complicity in his murder in 1929. The following year she was accused of complicity in the assassination attempt on the life of Pascual Ortiz Rubio, President of Mexico, and was deported.  She continued to photograph in exile in Berlin in 1930. She 
became a member of the Union GmbH press photographers association and published photographs in Der Arbeiter-Fotograf. She abandoned photography for political activism while in Moscow from 1931 to 1934 working for Soviet International Red Aid. 

Modotti moved to France in 1934 and worked in Madrid and Valencia, Spain, from 1935 to 1938. She was a reporter for the Republican newspaper Ayuda and worked for revolutionary movements and the International Red Cross from 1936 to 1938.  She returned to Mexico City under an alias in 1939, 
photographed, traveled, and continued her political work until her death of an apparent heart attack in 1942.

Modotti's work has received deserved attention in recent years after a long period of neglect. Her photographs were included in the Women of Photography touring exhibition of 1975, and she was the subject of a two-woman show with the painter Frida Kahlo in 1982-1983 in London and New York City.  She has been honored by one-woman shows at the Museum of 
Modern Art in New York City (1977), Festival Internazionale delle Donne 
in Arezzo, Italy (1978), and the Museum of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland (1980).

"Most of Tina Modotti's work that is known to the photography world was done in Mexico in the years 1923 through 1926, when she lived and worked with Edward Weston. She apparently continued to work after 1926, at least until 1930, when she was deported from Mexico for Communist activity."

"The photograph reproduced here is entitled "Staircase," but it is only in the most abstracted sense an architectural photograph; it is concerned with a different kind of structure, related perhaps to folded paper birds and geometric puzzles. It is a picture of space becoming pattern - a construction of lines and triangles stretched very tightly toward two dimensions - in which depth is both precisely described and subtly denied."

"Two technical aspects of the picture are interesting in terms of their relationship to Modotti's conception. The two-dimensionality of her picture has been strongly emphasized by the very heavy exposure of her negative, which has raised the values of the planes of the picture to a narrow range of light grays; only the thin straight lines of joinery are described as black. In addition, she has photographed her subject from a greater than 
normal distance (i.e., with a long focal-length lens), thus minimizing the effect of diminishing perspective. The pattern of the picture approaches the 
quality of an isometric projection - a perspective drawing made from an infinite distance."

"Although it is doubtless (or probably) irrelevant to the issue at hand, Modotti was surely one of the most fascinating women of her time, even without reference to her talent as an artist. She was an actress, a sometime revolutionary (by design or circumstance, or both), a great beauty, and a great mystery.  The available evidence would suggest that everyone who crossed her path was profoundly impressed. Kenneth Rexroth identified 
her as a Kollontai type, and was terrified, but nevertheless called her the 
most spectacular person in Mexico City."