and charming, Sargent made his money from painting the nouveau riche. He conveyed assurance with his fluid paint reflecting the confident well-dressed rich.
This large portrait (7 ft x 7 ft) of the four daughters of Edward Darley Boit is so striking that you stop dead before it. The painting — its dark shadows, the gleam of the vase, and the smear of the white pinafore dresses — is lush, a feast that stays with you for at least a week after your museum visit.
It is reminiscent of Las Meninas . Each child seems oddly isolated in this dark cavern of a room — almost a tomb — with the two Japanese vases. Yet the carpet, the sitting four-year-old child’s warmth, and the red screen set off the lushness and the sheer feeling of the starched white pinafores.
The four girls look like a difficult lot. Are these precocious children destined for original lives or an over-coddled disaster? Perhaps they intuit that the vases, vases that Boit, an art collector, took with him wherever he travelled, may have been more important than they are.
The eldest hides about the vase, not really in view, but relatively blank; the standing girl on the left is precocity itself; and the youngest sits just looking. Sister Wendy feels it is a portrait of a dysfunctional family.
In 2010, the Prado in Madrid exhibited this next to Las Meninas . It was quite a sight as Sargent’s painting stood up to the mighty Prado’s treasure.
What happened to these girls? A recent book, Sargent’s Daughters: A Biography of a Painting by Erica Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells us.
The parents: Mary Louisa Cushing, an heiress, and Edward Boit, a “courtly” lawyer, simply retired. They lived in Boston and Paris. He stopped his law practice and pursued watercolours with success. There is a watercolour of Venice by Boit (1911) in the Boston Museum.
None of the four daughters married. The eldest, Florence, with her back to the vase, rebelled and didn’t revel in the social whirl that the mother loved. “Florie” took up golf and lived with a cousin. Jane, the standing girl on the right, required nursing care in Paris. Mary Louisa (standing left) and Julia (the youngest — four years old) returned to Newport from Paris after many years. Julia was a good amateur watercolourist. In 1919, the four women gave the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts in memory of their father.
And Sargent? He declined a knighthood from Britain because he was an American citizen. At sixty-nine, he died successful and single. At death, he was reading Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique.
JP
12. Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and
Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840
Oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm
Henry Lillie Pierce Fund (99.22)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
I always look at Turner because he has an endless capacity to surprise. You cannot figure out the timing of his paintings as there wasn’t a logical sequence. He was doing things before the Impressionists had even thought of such innovations.
The slave ship, Zong, en route from Guinea to Jamaica in 1781, threw overboard sick and dying slaves so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance money available only for slaves “lost at sea.”
The owners of the Zong sued the ship’s underwriters for the value of 132 Africans, thrown overboard because the ship became short of water. They argued that to save the healthy, the ill had to be killed. The trial was before a jury in 1873, which found that the underwriters had to pay £30 for each slave.
There was an appeal to the King’s Bench before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and two others. Mansfield had been an attorney general. He was a foremost debater, a rival to William Pitt. As chief justice, he was a creator of English commercial law and was noted for his finding that slavery was “so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it.”
No doubt the ship owners lied. It was cheaper for them to kill the slaves and claim insurance — as simple as that. There appeared to be evidence that, although the ship was off course, there was water. The appeal makes for uncomfortable reading. One counsel said regarding slaves as property (see Gregson v. Gilbert (1873), 3 Douglas’ King’s Bench Reports 232 at 629):
It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property. This therefore, was a throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue. The question is, first, whether any necessity existed for that act.
The underwriters argued:
The truth was, that finding they should have a bad market for their slaves, they took these means of transferring the loss from the owners to the underwriter. Many instances have occurred of slaves dying for want of provisions but no attempt was ever made to bring such a loss within the policy. There is no instance in which the mortality of slaves falls upon the underwriters, except in the cases of perils of the sea and of enemies.
Lord Mansfield in his reasons ordering a new trial said:
There is no evidence of the ship being foul and leaky, and that certainly was not the cause of the delay. There is weight, also, in the circumstances of the throwing overboard of the negroes after the rain (if the fact be so) for which, upon the evidence, there appears to have been no necessity.
There is no report on the new trial, but this case probably led to the passing of a statute prohibiting the insuring of slaves against any loss or damage except “the perils of the sea, piracy, insurrection, capture, barratry, and destruction by fire; and providing that no loss or damage shall be recoverable on account of the mortality of slaves by natural death or ill treatment or against loss by throwing overboard on any account whatsoever.”
What is barratry, you ask? It is “fraud or gross negligence on the part of the master of the ship to the prejudice of the owners.”
Look closely at this fire of a painting. In front of the floundering ship, shackled legs and hands rise. A sun, engulfed in pink and red, sets over this grave of water.
Mark Twain, ever the acerbic art commentator, described it as “a tortoise-shell cat having a fit in a platter of tomatoes.”
John Ruskin’s father bought this painting for him in 1844. The acknowledged Victorian critic placed it at the end of his bed so it would be the first thing he would see when he woke up in the morning. He said of it, “… the noblest sea that Turner had ever painted and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man.”
There is an interesting dialogue set out in the 2014 Late Turner — Painting Set Free, Tate Britain London Exhibition , which includes this painting. Turner advised a young artist, “Keep your corners quiet. Centre your interest. And always remember that as you can never reach the brilliancy of nature, you need never be afraid to put your brightest light next to your deepest shadow in the centre.”4 In this painting, there is a white form in the centre, perhaps an angel bursting forth, arm raised, descending in judgment of the
