After the Meeting and Ernesta present a new direction in Beaux's work. It is more striking in After the Meeting where, in contrast to just about all of her other portraits, we see people and activity in the background and the woman in the foreground appears to be carrying on a conversation with someone we can't see. In the painting of her niece, Ernesta has become a new woman who can look regal and elegant, without pretending to live in a poetic, inner world and without hiding her intelligence. By placing the couch on an angle and showing more than half the table, Beaux has created a space which is almost as large as the space in the painting of the meeting room. The suggested backgrounds of the earlier paintings have become signs of the woman's involvement in the world outside the painting. What Beaux had begun to hint at in the painting of Bertha Vaughan (a woman who can only be completely... (http://www.radford.edu/rbarris/Women%20and%20art/amerwom05/womenpainting.html)