Cécile Boonans was born in a privileged family in Ghent. She was given special permission to take drawing lessons from a living model at the Ghent academy, then exclusively for male students. In 1906 she married Emile Cauterman, a civil engineer and director of the Vocational and Craft School Sint-Antonius. Expected to produce still lifes and flowers in pretty colors appropriate for female artists at the time, Cécile turned to the seamy side of society for inspiration. Inspired by Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Honoré Daumier, and Käthe Kollwitz, Cécile would focus on the ones effected by poverty and hunger, revealing their humanity.

Cauterman sought out poor people who lived on the fringes of Ghent’s society and had them pose for her. She set up her studio in a former monastery, turned into a tenement house, mostly occupied by the poor. There she made expressive portraits of beggars and prostitutes, crippled and retards in pencil and charcoal. She portrayed those at the margins of society as respectfully and objectively as possible, with all their flaws, without falling into stereotypes or caricatures.

The first reactions to these, often confrontational, works were dismissive. Nonetheless, Cauterman had a breakthrough at the triennial Salon of Ghent in 1921, after which her reputation spread beyond Ghent. Her 1925 exhibition at Le Cabinet Maldoror in Brussels generated a raving review by Karel van de Woestijne, naming her an exceptional Belgian artist and the "meticulous draftsman of the most striking hideousness".[1] In 1937 Cauterman, together with Charley Toorop and Tamara de Lempicka, exhibited at the international exhibition of female European artists at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris.[2]

Uninterested in the glamor of high society, the present rare self-portrait reveals the artist’s reflective soul rather than beauty or the attributes of the artist’s studio.

[1] "[...] is zij de minutieuze teekenaarster van de meest treffende afzichtelijkheid", "Gentsche Kunst", in: Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 3 March 1926.

[2] Les femmes artistes d'Europe, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 11-28 February 1937