course the girls also played at home, as evidenced by the doll Julia holds in Sargent’s portrait - perhaps even the same one she mentioned in her letter. The toy is of a new and modern type, the baby doll, first created in the mid-nineteenth century and manufactured in both France and Germany. Julia’s appears to be of the German variety, made out of molded composition (a mixture of pulped paper and other materials) and fabric. Immensely popular and relatively inexpensive, such dolls were distributed throughout Europe.42 Whether or not it was meant to be a baby, and no doubt to the amusement of others, Julia had named her doll Popau - the nickname of Paul de Cassagnac, a contemporary right-wing politician, journalist, and renowned duelist with sword and pistol who figured in the recently opened displays at Grévin’s popular waxworks.
Ned’s diaries show that he and his wife shared in their daughters’ activities, both indoors and out. Isa took them driving and to concerts; Ned accompanied them on long walks and read to them in the evenings. In summer, at whatever resort they inhabited, he often went swimming with them. In an age before antibiotics and systematic inoculations, the girls were frequently ill; their father mentions their various colds and other ailments with concern. In 1881, Henry James wrote to their mutual friend Etta Reubell in response to her report that the girls had the measles: “I should fear that those white little maidens were not suited to struggle with physical ills - their vitality is not sufficiently exuberant.” He added that he hoped the worst was over, for “it can’t have amused Mrs. Boit and it didn’t amuse me either, not to be able to see her.” Three years later, James heard that “Mrs. Boit has scarlet fever among her long white progeny.” 43 James’s characterization of the girls - little, long, white - suggests that they were passive and weak, lacking the physical energy and high spirits of many children of their age; but perhaps in James’s mind, the little girls’ personalities were overshadowed by the brilliancy of their vivacious mother.
Like most expatriate girls of their age and class, the Boit daughters were schooled at home under the guidance of a governess or tutor. But academic excellence was not the goal; Wharton later claimed that she “had been taught only two things in [her] childhood: the modern languages and good manners.”44 The girls would have learned languages - certainly French, in which they were all fluent, but also German and Italian. They would have been enrolled in dancing classes, a necessary part of their social education, probably starting their lessons in Paris. The Boits also loved music and each played an instrument, a typical accomplishment for young ladies and a necessary one for domestic entertainment. All of the girls were skilled performers, and they often joined together to present private evening musicales, sometimes with proper programs carefully illustrated by Julia, who had a talent for drawing. They favored pieces by contemporary French and German composers - elegies and nocturnes written for their chosen instruments. Music served as both a pastime and a consolation throughout their lives.
When their portrait was painted in 1882, the Boit sisters would still have been perceived as children. Even the eldest, fourteen-year-old Florie, who leans against the vase in the background, still wears her hair down and her skirt at midcalf, only a bit longer than that of her younger sister Isa, whose skirt falls just below her knee. Some etiquette advisors suggested that girls of thirteen should wear ankle-length dresses, indicating their progression toward adulthood. Then, as now, many girls sought to speed up the process, wearing their hair up and their skirts long - and even adopting corsets - as soon as they could get away with it. How the Boit girls felt about such things is unknown; their cousin Mary was eager to lengthen her skirts when she turned thirteen, as other girls of her age had done, despite (or perhaps because of) the objections of her stepmother.45 If the girls or their mother had kept diaries (and if so, had their journals survived), such questions might be more easily answered. As it is, their father and uncle recorded few such intimate and feminine details. In April 1885, Ned noted that Florie and Jeanie “had their hair done up by Maxine,” presumably in an adult style. In July 1886, he wrote that Isa (mère) had allowed eighteen-year-old Florie to drive after lunch; his entry is marked with an exclamation point, as if the event were a momentous occasion.46 Despite these signs of maturity, the four girls remain forever young in Sargent’s portrait.
The Boits, Sargent, and Children
BY THE TIME Sargent’s work on their daughters’ portrait began, Ned and Isa Boit must have known the artist quite well. Unless Sargent had been thinking about it for some time (and no evidence suggests that he did), the painting sprang into being very quickly. It is equally a portrait and an interior, an homage to modern painting and to the art of the past, and one of Sargent’s greatest works. The exact circumstances surrounding its genesis are unknown; nothing chronicles a formal agreement between painter and patron. Sargent clearly was given considerable artistic freedom with the composition. His portrait was entirely unorthodox, for it is very unusual in a commissioned likeness to obscure the features of two of the sitters. It was made for people who understood both Sargent’s aesthetic sensibility and his artistic ambitions, individuals who had more of a connection to him than clients undertaking a business transaction. The relationship between Sargent and the Boits provides one clue to the painting’s unconventionality.
Ned and Isa had probably first met Sargent in France in the late 1870s. Their social and artistic circles intersected broadly, but it could have been Ned’s teacher François-Louis Français who provided the network that first drew them together. One of Français’s close friends was Carolus-Duran, Sargent’s instructor. Français and Carolus had met when they were both young art students in Paris in the late 1850s; they traveled together in Italy in 1864 and remained good friends for the rest of their lives.47 It seems likely that the path between their two American students, both of whom had Boston connections, would have been a short one. Sargent may also have met the Boits through mutual American friends, among them the Paris-based hostess Etta Reubell, either in the city or in one of a number of summer places, including St. Enogat and St. Malo, where all of them circulated in the 1870s. “Sargent was a great friend of us all,” Julia later explained.48
Before starting the portrait, and since the time he had completed ElJaleo and the Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt), Sargent had undertaken two other artistic campaigns that would affect his conception for his large and unusual painting of the Boits. One was a series of Venetian interiors that he created in 1880 and 1882, and the other was a small portrait of Louise Escudier, the wife of a prominent Parisian lawyer. Both had offered Sargent the opportunity to experiment with the placement of figures within a large interior space and to play with the effects of filtered and reflecting light. Many scholars have even suggested that The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, although painted in Paris, was the culmination of Sargent’s Venetian experience.49
The artist made two working trips to Venice in the early 1880s, the first during the fall and winter of 1880-81 and the second during the summer of 1882, after displaying El Jaleo at the Salon and just before starting the Boit portrait. His activities in Venice and the exact chronology of the works he made there remain somewhat obscure, but it is likely that he went with the intention of finding a subject he could work up into a Salon picture, as he had done on many other occasions.50 His 1877 trip to Brittany, for example, resulted in his important oil En route pour la pêche, which he displayed at the 1878 Salon. In the summer of 1878, Sargent went to Capri, a journey that inspired his next Salon picture, Dans les oliviers, à Capri (1879, private collection); in 1879, he went to Spain and Morocco, later producing the exotic North African-inspired Fumée d’ambre gris (1880, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute)
