There is every reason to believe that Sargent had in mind to paint a Venetian subject for the Salon.
In September 1880, Sargent refused an invitation from Matilda Paget (the mother of his friend Violet Paget, better known as Vernon Lee), explaining to her that “there may be only a few more weeks of pleasant season here [in Venice] and I must make the most of them ... I must do something for the Salon and have determined to stay as late as possible.” In the summer of 1882, he again wrote to Mrs. Paget from Venice, apologizing that he was unable to visit her in Siena because he was “really bound to stay another month or better two in this place so as not to return to Paris with empty hands.”51 Sargent did not return to Paris entirely empty-handed, but neither did he ever display a major Venetian painting at the Salon. For that traditional venue, he would have needed to paint a large canvas, something worked up in the studio from the smaller paintings and drawings he had completed on-site. The sultry street scenes and shadowy interiors he had finished in Venice were too small, sketchy, and informal for the Salon, although he did show them at other more liberal and forward-thinking venues in both Paris and London.
Sargent’s Venetian paintings were unusual in their concentration on the city’s narrow back streets and its decrepit palaces - shabby interiors that betray few hints of their former richness - and in their deliberate avoidance of familiar tourist vistas. Martin Brimmer, a Boston art patron and one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, called them “half finished ... inspired by the desire of finding what no one else has sought here - unpicturesque subjects, absence of color, absence of sunlight.”52 In part, Sargent’s refusal to record conventional scenes must have come from his search for an unusual subject to build into a Salon painting, one that would capture attention in the way that El Jaleo had done. If The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit can be read as the culmination of his Venetian studies, then the interiors he made there disclose some of the artistic problems he hoped to resolve.
Sargent completed about eight paintings in Venice that show interiors with multiple figures. Most of them depict large open rooms, the upper floors of canal-side palaces that by the 1880s served a variety of purposes, from artists’ studios to literary retreats to working-class apartments. Sargent used the long shadowy spaces as stage sets, moving his models around in intricately choreographed groupings. The figures do not always relate to one another, nor do they necessarily engage the viewer. In all of them, light filters through the area indirectly and often from the back, reflecting the polished pavement of the floor, glinting from furnishings and picture frames, and bathing the scene in a pearly opalescence that disguises as much as it reveals. The rooms and the activities that take place within them remain obscure and enigmatic, and Sargent deliberately avoids a clear narrative.
These Venetian interiors call to mind some of the more modern paintings Sargent might have seen in Paris, particularly the work of Edgar Degas. Sargent’s personal relationship with Degas, if any, is unclear. No known evidence documents more than a passing acquaintance between the two men, although Sargent’s name and his rue Notre Dame des Champs address do appear in one of Degas’s notebooks. Degas used the book for sketches and reminders during the period 1877-83, at just the moment when Sargent seems to have been most affected by the French master’s work. Both men were friendly with composer Emmanuel Chabrier and bassoonist Desiré Dihau, the main figures in Degas’s Orchestra of the Opéra (about 1870, Musée d’Orsay); Dihau also sometimes played with the Pasdeloup Orchestra, which Sargent depicted in 1879. Contemporary sketchbooks of both artists include lively drawings of the gaily dressed clowns who entertained between acts at the Cirque d’Hiver, where Pasdeloup performed, and also at the Cirque Fernando, where Degas painted. Sargent was well acquainted with a number of other artists and writers in Paris who could have brought him into contact with Degas - among them Jacques-Emile Blanche, Mary Cassatt, George Moore, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, and of course Carolus-Duran (although Degas disparaged him for his slick style) - but there is no record that any of them ever did. While Degas reportedly dismissed Sargent as “a facile painter but not an artist,” Sargent admired Degas: when he visited the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877, he made a pencil sketch after Degas’s pastel of a ballerina, L’Etoile, one of the few copies Sargent made after a contemporary work (Worcester Art Museum).53
Whether or not the two men knew or liked each other, the French master’s art became part of Sargent’s visual vocabulary. Echoes of Degas’s subjects and compositions reverberate in his paintings of the late 1870s and early 1880s. Sargent’s interest in subjects from modern life - the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pasdeloup Orchestra - reveal his awareness of the themes explored by Degas and his colleagues, among them the Italian painters active in Paris, such as Giuseppe de Nittis and Giovanni Boldini. The almost monochromatic palette and swirling design of Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d’Hiver (1879, private collection on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago) betray Sargent’s fascination with some of the unconventional formal qualities of Degas’s work. Sargent would never fully develop these avant-garde tendencies, preferring instead to maintain a more conservative profile; as Mary Cassatt snidely remarked, he cared too much what other people thought.54 But in his less formal paintings, including his Venetian interiors, he toyed with some of Degas’s motifs - the tipped-up floors, the oblique sources of filtered light, and the arbitrary arrangement of figures.
Sargent incorporated some of these ingredients into the portraits he was making during the same period. He posed Louise Escudier, for example, next to the tall windows of a Parisian interior, depicting her as a figure within a room rather than as a sitter standing before a backdrop (Madam Paul Escudier [Louise Lefevre], 1882, Art Institute of Chicago). This conceit allowed him to experiment with the effects of half-lights and shadows as they fell across her features from the side. Madame Escudier and the windows are reflected in the small mirror hanging in the background, further expanding the space and diffusing the silvery light. While the portrait is reminiscent of the fashionable French interiors with female figures painted by Sargent’s friend Alfred Stevens, a Belgian artist active in Paris, Sargent did not aspire to Stevens’s polish or to his fascination with the details of decoration and the luster of fabric. His canvas is roughly worked, with some areas barely sketched in and others thickly brushed. The painting relates equally well to his own Venetian interiors, particularly his studies of single figures, some small and some large, which seem to be the remnants of his abandoned ideas for a Salon picture.55
These same properties are apparent in Sargent’s portrait of the Boit daughters. Madame Paul Escudier may even have served as a sort of rehearsal for the Boits, giving Sargent an occasion to experiment with the placement of a figure within a domestic interior, a composition that combines elements of portraiture with an intensive study of light and shadow. The uneven paint surface of Madame Paul Escudier provides evidence of the numerous slight changes Sargent made to the locations of various objects in the room and suggests that he was working out those relationships as he went along. There are no such signs in the Boit portrait; the only areas showing pentimenti are Julia’s lap, where the position of the doll was changed, and the minor repositioning of the figure of Mary Louisa, which moved a bit further down in the picture. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (like El Jaleo) was painted directly and quickly, brush and palette knife employed with supreme assurance, all of its artistic problems solved in advance.56
Sargent had gained experience with painting children before he rendered the Boit girls; in fact, of all the early portraits he made that might be counted as commissions, fully one-third of them depict young sitters.57 Like any artist at the beginning of his career, he would have been glad to receive genuine orders for portraits, and in response he created engaging likenesses that often reveal the lively personalities of his subjects. Robert de Cévrieux,
