back stands another, slightly older, pretty, and very still. With her arms clasped behind her back and one foot slightly in front of the other, she seems about to rise on her toes, a little ballerina. The two older children are in the back, in shadow, and harder to see. One mirrors the position of the girl at left, although her hands have fallen to her sides. Her face is the liveliest: her mouth is slightly open, as if she had just been speaking or moving about. The fourth leans back, the curve of her spine aligned with the shape of the large vase behind her. It seems as if we could walk right into their world, passing straight through to their enchanted dark space, where impossibly huge vases glimmer in the half-light. But when we get close to the girls, they vanish, dissolving into a jumble of paint, great slashing strokes of whites, pinks, greens, blacks, and browns, just as the history of their lives is fractured by incomplete documentation, stray whispers, and silence.
The painting itself continues to speak. Watching people look at it in the museum’s galleries can be fascinating. Viewers seem to spend more time with it than they do with others in the room where it hangs. Often they are artists, bewitched by Sargent’s ability with the brush. Sometimes they are mothers who use the picture’s accessibility - the youngest girl sits so close to the visitor - to engage their own small children. Some visitors beg the museum staff for admission to the gallery if the room is closed for an installation, usually recounting the long distances they have traveled just to see this one thing, this icon, this masterpiece. People weep in front of it. James Elkins, in his book Pictures and Tears, a meditation on the emotional responses art can generate, wrote of a man who shared with him the fact that whenever he and his wife visited the MFA, “she goes to see John Singer Sargent’s Daughters of Edward D. Boit. She stands there, crying, for about twenty minutes. He says she has never offered him any explanation ... there may be a quality in the painting that disturbs memories this woman cannot quite recover.”4 Elkins assumes her recollections are unhappy, based on some ineffable discontent she sees reflected in the portrait - but they could equally be based on wistfulness, or loss, or even sentimental desire.
Reactions to the painting are often intensely personal and seem solidly rooted in the viewer’s own relationships. Art historians are taught and reminded that it is impossible to be impartial, that every analysis is colored by the experiences of an individual observer at a specific time. Even so, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit has elicited more interpretation than most portraits of children. Many have been tempted to see the Boit daughters enacting a narrative of the stages of childhood, from toddler to adolescent. This vision has caused other ghosts to appear alongside the girls, most notably those of twentieth-century psychologists like G. Stanley Hall and Sigmund Freud. With their theories in mind, some viewers look at Sargent’s portrait through a veil of psychoanalysis, watching the girls turning inward as they age, transformed from the uninhibited (open, light) life of childhood to a more restricted (closed, dark) world of adolescence and adulthood. In consequence and over time, the painting has been interpreted in many different ways. Soon after it was finished, James described it as a “happy play-world of a family of charming children.” The author later demonstrated in his novel The Turn of the Screw (1898) that he knew something about children and evil, but he saw nothing unusual in Sargent’s depiction. In contrast, an anonymous blogger in 2005 found the image distinctly unpleasant, proposing that the “availability” of the youngest child, sitting in the light with her doll between her legs, meant something quite different from innocent play.5
How could such a transformation from purity to corruption take place? Or is that later interpretation entirely off the mark, revealing more about the observer than the observed? Is the painting a simple portrait, a complicated artistic problem, an emotional treatise, or some intoxicating combination? Who was John Sargent in 1882, and what did he see and/or seek that year when he painted these girls? What role did the Boits play in its artistic conception? Does the fact that none of the girls later married have any relevance to our understanding of a painting made when they were children? How and when did their portrait come to represent to so many viewers an illustration of defined psychological traits?
The goal of this book is to explore, insofar as it is possible, all of those questions: to investigate and bring to life the story of the artist, his patrons, and his sitters, and to relate what happened to all of them after the portrait was made. The painting - a physical object - also has a narrative, enacted both before and after its dramatis personæ had passed from the world. These stories can be told without destroying any of the special magic this canvas weaves, for one of the powers a masterpiece exerts is its ability to speak to many people in countless ways over a long period of time. Sargent’s viewers, both past and present, have interacted with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit on a variety of levels. There is no right or wrong response, no single way to react, no one path to falling in love. From this singular picture, a novel unfolds.
John Singer Sargent
JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is one of the paintings that his friend Henry James, both novelist and art critic, had in mind when he wrote that the artist possessed a “slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn.” Sargent’s sense of design, his ability to capture character, and his facility with a brush were remarkable. He also had an almost unerring sense of how to establish a professional reputation, making and selecting for display paintings that would attract attention for their dash and daring but that would not be dismissed as too avant-garde. In his early years, the artist was careful to show both portraits and subject pictures, perhaps as yet uncertain as to which genre would provide him with the best path to critical acclaim.6 In Sargent’s Daughters, the two kinds of subjects he favored are inextricably linked. Both a likeness and a genre scene, the painting brilliantly combines specificity and mystery.
Sargent was a talented young artist in 1882, the year he painted Ned and Isa Boit’s daughters. Like his patrons, he was an American thoroughly at home in Europe. He had even been born abroad, in Florence, to expatriate American parents who traveled perpetually from Italy to Switzerland, France, Germany, and back again. His father, Fitzwilliam Sargent, was a quiet physician from Philadelphia, although the family originated in Massachusetts. Fitzwilliam had given up his medical practice at the urging of his wife, Mary New-bold Singer Sargent, a forceful, restless, romantic personality and an amateur watercolor painter; she, like the Boits, much preferred life in Europe to the United States. Sargent grew up with two sisters: Emily, a year younger and his constant companion, and Violet, who was fourteen years younger. (Violet was the same age as Ned and Isa Boit’s daughter Jane.) Described by his childhood friend Vernon Lee as “an accentless mongrel,” Sargent spoke and read four languages fluently. He loved music, was a talented pianist, and befriended many composers and performers. These literary and musical interests provided amusement for Sargent, but they never took him away from his devotion to painting. From a young age, he sketched constantly, and by 1870 his father was reporting, “My boy John seems to have a strong desire to be an Artist by profession.”7
Sargent first studied art at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence, but in 1874, when he was eighteen, his parents decided to move the family to Paris, where their son could take advantage of the best training programs available. There, Sargent enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the illustrious state-sponsored art school that emphasized instruction in the traditional skills of academic figure drawing and painting. He also joined the atelier of Charles-Auguste Emile Durand, known as Carolus-Duran, a young, popular, and fashionable French portraitist who had won acclaim for his bravura approach to painting and for his exciting images of stylish society women.
Paris in the 1870s had taken its place as the art capital of the Western world. Earlier in the century, Rome had been the city that attracted an international audience of aspiring artists, lured there by the remnants of the classical past.
