The shifting riverscape of the Hudson Valley, with its strangely cloudlike, mounded perspectives stretching away to the north, has the atmosphere of a gateway to wilderness. Just south of the vast bridge at Tarrytown lives the artist Cecily Brown. One more bend in the river, and the high-rises of the Bronx can be seen in the distance. The unmediated presence of humans in the physical environment is one subject of Cecily Brown’s work and is a source of its striking flavor of moral ambiguity.

In a world as susceptible to fashions, fads and misdiagnosed talent as the New York visual-arts scene in the 1990s, Cecily Brown made an unusual wunderkind. With paintings of the highest canonical refinement, Cecily’s art appeared to have tunneled up through the continuum of Western art history and emerged into the light-trailing, kaleidoscopic sense-memories of everything we had ever looked at. Like an explosion in a museum, recognizable fragments — from Masaccio to Goya to Manet to de Kooning — lay everywhere, still burning with color and life. Part of the impact, undoubtedly, came from her femininity and her youthful insouciance — a woman carelessly executing the male master strokes for her own mental reference — but her new and authentic virtuosity was unmistakable. Her work was quickly recognized and made the art world’s favorite transition into high-capital worth before she was 35. Success caused her neither to falter nor to swerve: On the contrary, she seemed not to notice or need it in the disciplined frenzy of her development over the following decade. The male gaze, somehow, had been politely but ruthlessly turned back on itself. Without exposing or denigrating herself, without anger or radicalism, Cecily Brown simply took aesthetic authority away from its usual custodians and into her own hands.

In Cecily’s studio, her works in progress stand against the walls: Their characteristic plenitude and motion are already recognizable. It is in her use of color that she creates, at first sight, her strong referential impact. Her palette passes swiftly through the palettes of other artists, invoking and then distancing herself from them in a continual forward movement. It is not only beauty but the memory of beauty — of how beauty has been achieved in the art we’ve looked at — that she is describing. The forward movement is surprising, for it is toward the untransfigured images of the everyday. Within these half-familiar surfaces are to be found the things we also recognize about our own world, its particular versions of violence, banality, injustice, greed, its uglinesses and most of all its human forms. In her cross-referencing, Cecily Brown raises questions about the morality and meaning of representation, and the moral status of beauty itself.

Now 50, she is the daughter of the talented, underrated British writer Shena Mackay. As a mother, Shena was at odds with the manners and mores of the suburban English world — with its preoccupation with keeping up appearances — in which the family lived. Cecily recalls an occasion on which her mother came to collect her from school wearing a long gold cape and platform shoes, apparently unaware of the impression she made. Brilliant and eccentric, a gregarious and generous woman, she found conformity taxing. Once, on a trip home, Cecily and her mother were riding in a taxi through London when they spied Boris Johnson on the street; Shena opened the window in order to shake her fist at him.

A figure in Cecily’s childhood was one of Shena’s oldest friends, the influential art critic and curator David Sylvester. Sylvester’s seminal writings on figures like Paul Klee, Francis Bacon, Alberto Giacometti and Lucian Freud had been central in formulating a cultural vision of and language for painting in the 20th century. When Cecily got older, he would sometimes take her to exhibitions; in his company, she met some of the towering figures of the contemporary art scene and heard intimate talk about many others. He showed a special interest in her emerging talent, an interest that was startling and half-overwhelming to receive from such a source. Their friendship continued through her teenage years. Though she saw him infrequently, his recognition was an important spur to her ambitions, which at the time seemed more or less impossible to attain. She struggled to put together the portfolio that would get her into the Slade, but was finally accepted. When she was 21, David and Shena came to her with an admission: She was their child; David, not the man she had thought of as her father, was her biological parent.

Her first reaction, Cecily says, was to think with a jolt of his praise of her ability: A shadow of doubt now stood over it. Did he actually think she was any good? Was it just because she was his daughter? But after a while, something else happened: She began to feel a connection, not exactly with David but through him; a connection to a landscape she had looked at, until now, from a distance. The monolithic figures in that landscape, like Bacon and de Kooning, were men David had known and deeply understood, men whose shocking work he had helped the world look at. For Cecily, David’s masculinity was the bridge to theirs: It was permission to come closer, to see herself in a new context, the context not of her youth or her femininity but of 20th-century art. She jokes that she felt as if she had suddenly inherited a roomful of fairy godfathers. David’s painter friends joked that he had got himself reincarnated as a brilliant young artist.