Born in New York City, apparently between 1853 and 1870, Cecilia Smith was educated in convent schools. In 1886 she went to Paris, where she studied painting with Alexandre Cabanel and Edouard Detaille. Within the next three years she married Josiah W. Wentworth, and it was as Mme. C. E. Wentworth that she first exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1889. She continued to exhibit there for 30 years. She became widely noted as a portraitist, and over the years her sitters included President Theodore Roosevelt, President William Howard Taft, Queen Alexandra of England (a portrait commissioned by the king of Spain), and General John J. Pershing. Her portrait of Pope Leo XIII won a bronze medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 and prompted the Pope to decorate her with the title of grand commander of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre and create her a papal marchesa. (The portrait later hung in the Vatican Museum.)
She was an officer d╒acadÄmie from 1894 and a chevalier of the Legion of Honor from 1901. Her paintings won prizes in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, and she was one of the very few woman artists to have works purchased for the Luxembourg Museum. Works by her were later acquired also by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and other leading museums. She died in Nice, France, on August 28, 1933.
