Eulabee Dix: Gilded Age Miniaturist

In 2023, the site received an amazing donation from a Mills family descendant, Dorothy Fell Farrelly, a granddaughter of Dorothy Fell Mills, widow of Ogden Livingston Mills. She and her husband Louis donated three miniature portraits of family members including Margaret Lewis Livingston, Darius Ogden Mills, and a painting never before seen by us, of Ruth Livingston Mills. After some research, we were able to find out that the artist who painted the portrait of Ruth was a woman named Eulabee Dix (1878-1961), an artist who specialized in miniature portraits.

"Mrs. Ogden Mills" by Eulabee Dix, 1907, Watercolor on Ivory

At first inspection, the portrait of Mrs. Mills looks both familiar and unfamiliar.  There were some similarities with the portrait of Mrs. Mills by François Flameng (1909) that currently hangs in Staatsburgh’s boudoir.[1]  She is holding a type of fan and wearing pearl jewelry in both portraits.  In addition, both gowns have some ruching near the bodice and chiffon accents, but it is clearly not the same portrait.  The differences are apparent when the portraits are side by side, but it is also undoubtedly the same woman in both.

(L) Ruth Mills by Eulabee Dix, 1907 (R) Ruth Mills by François Flameng, 1909 

The portrait was signed in red paint, but the name is very small and hard to decipher without any context. Thankfully, the article below from American Art News on November 2, 1907, mentioned the name of an artist who visited Newport that summer to paint miniatures of Mrs. Mills and her children. Unless there are other undiscovered miniatures of Ruth Mills, this had to be it! A quick look at Dix’s other portraits revealed that she had signed other works in red, and an examination of the signature on Ruth’s miniature with this new information strongly suggests Eulabee Dix as the artist of this small portrait.

American Art News, November 2, 1907, p.3

The article states that Miss Dix also painted the Mills children, but we are unsure if that meant she painted all three children or just one. We only found evidence of a miniature portrait of Beatrice Mills. If Dix also painted Gladys and Ogden L., we have not been able to find evidence of those portraits. The portrait of Beatrice was in a newspaper because the miniature portraits of both Ruth and Beatrice were featured in a December 1907 exhibition of Eulabee Dix miniatures at the Bauer- Folsom Galleries, located at 396 Fifth Avenue, New York. The exhibit featured 18 miniatures and ran from December 3-31, 1907. We do not know the current location or owner of Beatrice’s miniature portrait.

Beatrice Mills by Eulabee Dix, 1907

American Art News, December 7, 1907, p.6.  According to this article, the miniature portrait of Ruth Mills was not even completed when it was displayed in the gallery!

Miniature portraits painted in watercolor on ivory were extremely popular in Europe from the 18th century onward, and later in America, and female artists were fairly well represented in the practice of creating these small, intimate likenesses. The application of translucent pigment onto a thin panel of ivory gave the flesh tones of pale skin a luminosity that was prized, but the exacting techniques used to model facial features in a convincing three-dimensional form, and endow them with animating expression, required precision and great skill, and mistakes were hard to correct.  The arrival of the daguerreotype in 1839 brought a dramatic drop in the popularity and production of ivory miniatures, as people turned to the fast and unparalleled likenesses they produced. Many miniaturists re-trained themselves in this and later photographic techniques to meet market demand, and the tradition of hand-painted portraits diminished.  However, there was a resurgence in popularity for painted miniature portraits at the turn of the century, as the Colonial Revival Movement advocated for handmade art objects, technical skill, and traditional art forms. The American Society of Miniature Painters was established in 1899. Dix was among a group of artists who revived a by-then nearly lost art form.[2]  It is also easy to see why wealthy Gilded Age Americans would value this type of portrait with its longstanding tradition of documenting the wealthy and aristocratic society of Europe, through small, intimate and portable likenesses.

Eulabee Dix sitting at her desk in her Carnegie Hall Towers studio at 152 West 57th St, NYC, 1903
Image: New York Times Advertisement

About the Artist

Eulabee Dix was born in 1878 in Greenfield, Illinois to a family that encouraged her interest in art from an early age.  She studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts and with William J. Whittemore and Isaac A. Josephi, the first President of the American Society of Miniature Painters.  Whittemore taught her the technique of painting watercolor on ivory, which is the medium most frequently used in miniature portraits from this era.  It was a painstaking process using such a fragile and thin medium as ivory.  

Eulabee Dix, me, c.1899, Watercolor on Ivory
Image: National Museum of Women in the Arts

Dix moved to New York in 1899 to begin her professional career and right around that time she painted the above self-portrait.   Even though Dix was not a wealthy society woman, she began to dress the part and would hold Friday afternoon gatherings in her home studio to show her work to potential buyers.  She received commissions from prominent New Yorkers and in 1904 she befriended Minnie Stevens Paget (1853-1919), an American heiress married to British Army general Sir Arthur Paget.  Lady Paget was also a friend of King Edward VII and had numerous connections.  Dix started splitting her time between New York and London and she received commissions of many prominent people through her relationship with Paget.  Lady Paget was also in the same social circles as Ruth Mills so it is possible that their connection influenced Ruth’s decision to commission Dix for a portrait in 1907.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) by Eulabee Dix, 1908, watercolor on ivory
Image: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

One of Dix’s best-known miniature portraits was of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain.  The author was the individual who coined the term “The Gilded Age” in his 1873 book of the same name.  Clemens notoriously sat for very few portraits, but in 1908, just two years before his death, he agreed to meet with Dix and pose for five one-hour sittings.  As seen in the portrait above, in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, he wore doctoral robes.  In 1907, Oxford University conferred an honorary degree on Clemens for his contributions to literature. This miniature was the last portrait of Clemens painted from life, before his death two years later.

Girl in Wedding Gown (Mrs. Eulabee Dix Becker) by Robert Henri, 1910
Image: Museum of Nebraska Art

In 1910, Dix married Alfred LeRoy Becker (1878-1948), a lawyer from Buffalo who later became the Deputy Attorney General of New York State from 1915-1919.  The artist Robert Henri (1865-1929) painted Dix in her wedding dress in 1910.  The marriage produced two children, Philip and Joan, when the couple first settled in Buffalo before moving to Albany and New York.  The marriage was strained partially because they both continued to pursue their own successful careers, but it lasted 15 years before they divorced in 1925.  The divorce was contentious, and the newspapers reported that Dix provided the court copies of her husband’s love letters to another woman when seeking alimony.

Press & Sun Bulletin, October 21, 1927, p.1 

Following her divorce, Dix split her time between the United States and Europe.  Her work  won a medal at the Paris Salon in 1927 and also received awards in New York and Philadelphia before her fortunes changed.  With the onset of the Great Depression, many of Dix’s clients lost money, and miniature painting itself went out of favor in the 1930s.  Since she could no longer support herself as a miniature artist, she lectured about miniature painting, pivoted to floral still life paintings, and even got a job painting airplane parts during World War II.  She painted her last miniature in 1950, but was unable to finish it due to failing eyesight.  Dix moved to Portugal in the 1950s, but returned home to see her son shortly before her death in 1961. 

Philip Dix Becker by Eulabee Dix, 1912, Watercolor on Ivory
Image: Metropolitan Museum of Art

While there were successful women artists during the Gilded Age, fewer women found critical acclaim and financial success as artists than their male counterparts.  Although she is not as well known today as an artist such as Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), Eulabee Dix was the epitome of a Gilded Age woman who was both independent and strong-willed.  She did not come from wealth, but she learned how to move through society’s circles in order to get commissions.  She painted many well-known women like Ruth Mills, Beatrice Mills, Lady Paget, the actress Ethel Barrymore, but was also able to secure the trust of Mark Twain!  Her work was exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and today is in the collections of many museums.  The largest collection is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, which holds 86 of her paintings and an archival collection of her papers.  At Staatsburgh, we are thrilled to have this portrait in our collection.  All of the other Mills and Livingston family portraits in our collection were painted by men, but it is fitting that we now have an example of a portrait of a strong woman painted by another strong woman.

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[1] Even though they look similar, there are significant differences in their relative scales.  The miniature by Dix is 4.5” x 3.5” while the larger portrait by Flameng measures 58” x 45”.

[2] Carrie Rebora Barratt, “A Brief History of American Portrait Miniatures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” in American Portrait Miniatures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale UP, 2010,  page 4