of Corot’s imagery and his ability to capture light, air, and atmosphere astonished Boit, and he resolved to follow his heart and become an artist. Brother Bob later confessed that Ned seemed at “rather an advanced age to begin [a new career] - but for the first time in his life he has found something which is really absorbing to him + the only occupation he has ever devoted himself to with zeal + industry.”23 Like so many aspiring American painters of the age, Ned planned to study art abroad. Isa Boit enthusiastically supported (both emotionally and financially) the idea of living in Europe, which she much preferred to Boston or Newport, and thus Ned was able to leave the law behind him.
By the time they began organizing their move, the family had grown again to three children. Florence was born in Newport on May 6, 1868, and Jane had arrived on January 17, 1870, also in Newport. But these joys were tempered, for Ned and Isa were now faced with the heartbreaking task of splitting up their family and leaving their firstborn son, Neddie, behind. It must have been a challenging period for all of them, despite the advice they received from the best physicians. Neddie clearly was not normal. “At the age of two he could talk,” recalled Bob Boit. “Then he suddenly stopped, lost his intelligence, and became an idiot - and when [he was] 5 or 6 years old [he] had to be sent from home for the sake of the other children.” The Boits found a place for him in Barre, Massachusetts, at a private boarding school for “feeble-minded” children established in 1851. The institution was run by Dr. George Brown according to the theories of the day; students were separated by sex and ability, as well as by income level, and teachers sought to improve their state through physical education and manual training.24 Whatever schooling was provided for Neddie seems to have had little effect, and he never regained his ability to communicate. His illness preoccupied the family for years to come.
In the fall of 1871, without their son, the Boit family left for Europe. Ned was drawn first to Italy and then to the French countryside and ultimately to Paris, increasingly intrigued by the liberation from detail and emphasis on overall effect that he saw in the paintings of the French school. Among the friends the Boits made at this time were Henry James and painter Frederic Crowninshield, two men with Boston connections who would be in and out of their society for the rest of their lives, as they intersected with one another in a variety of cities on the international circuit. Some sources indicate that James met the Boits in Rome, others in Boston, but they were certainly acquainted by the spring of 1873, when James mentioned them in a letter from Rome to his mother. The Boits and Crowninshields participated actively in Rome’s whirl of expatriate social occasions and intrigue. In 1871, they attended a great Renaissance costume ball given by lawyer and diplomat Maitland Armstrong, who later remembered that “among the most beautiful American women [to attend] were Mrs. Frederick Crowninshield and Mrs. Edward Boyt [sic] of Boston,” adding that “all the artists were there.” During this same period, James chronicled exhilarating riding parties on the Roman Campagna, noting in confidence that he thought it best to “fight shy of Mrs. Boit who ... is an equestrian terror.”25
In the same 1873 letter, James referred to Boit and Crowninshield as “a couple of young artists.” Boit had taken a studio on the via Margutta, at the center of the American art community in Rome. Some scholars have suggested that he may have studied with William Stanley Haseltine, an American landscapist and fellow Harvard man who was much praised for his crystalline depictions of Italy’s rocky coast. Soon thereafter, both Boit and Haseltine appeared in the correspondence of another American expatriate painter, Elihu Vedder. Vedder had apparently made a remark that had been taken amiss, as he wrote to a friend of Haseltine’s in 1876, “I gather you reported my saying - I thought amateurs like Haseltine and Boit had no business to open studios here in Rome. As to Haseltine it is utterly impossible that I should have called him an amateur when I have known him for years as a professional artist.” But Vedder did not elevate Boit from his amateur status, a condition that would haunt Ned throughout his career. His comfortable economic circumstances and his high social position kept some individuals from fairly assessing his artistic accomplishments. Vedder continued to complain about Boit, noting that while he “had always praised [Boit’s work] as far as it goes as very good,” he was insulted by what he had heard about Boit’s decision not to “mix with the artists in Rome.” Vedder angrily proclaimed, “It makes me mad to see people who have grown up without a thought of art until the idea suddenly strikes them of taking it up, [who] after a few lessons from some French master ... set up a studio and are classed among regular artists and turn up their noses at men who fought out the battle for themselves.”26 Vedder would later relent, and he enjoyed Boit’s watercolors when he saw them on display in Boston in 1887. His initial quarrel with Ned may have been rooted in insult or jealousy, but it also seems likely that Vedder and Boit were on opposite sides of an artistic divide that opened during this period, when Rome had started to lose its luster and the art capital shifted north to Paris.
Boit had already begun to transfer his artistic allegiance to France, and the family spent more and more time there. At least by 1876, Ned had taken a studio at 139, boulevard Montparnasse, on the Left Bank in the heart of the city’s artistic quarter. Sometime in the early 1870s, he had indeed become the pupil of “some French master,” the French landscapist François-Louis Français, himself a student of Corot, the artist from whom Boit had received his initial inspiration. Français shared Boit’s love for Corot’s atmospheric approach and also for Italy; it is possible that the two men first met there, when Français traveled to Italy in 1873. Boit acquired one of Français’s dense forest scenes, painted near Plombières, Français’s birthplace, as well as a highly finished ink drawing of trees in Brittany, both of which he would donate to the Museum of Fine Arts upon his return to Boston in 1879.
Boit’s apprenticeship with Français drew to a close in 1876, when his painting La Plage de Villers (Calvados) was accepted by the jury for display at the Salon in Paris. The canvas has disappeared, but Ned’s brother described it as a landscape of “Rocks, beach + ocean,” implying that the scene was straightforward, with no heroic narrative or dramatic subject. Other early examples of Boit’s work, along with his interest in the Barbizon School, suggest that the painting employed the subdued palette and balanced composition favored by other popular landscapists at the 1876 Salon, Français among them.27 Boit’s subject, the beach at Villers, a village on the Normandy coast just west of Trouville, had been popular with French painters in the 1850s and 1860s when the town was first being developed as a seaside resort. Coastal scenes were quickly becoming a favored motif for a variety of French artists, from the academicians to the Impressionists. Ned certainly knew this, but his own family’s maritime history and his upbringing in coastal New England would have given him a natural affinity for the subject.
Ned’s painting must have been based on sketches he made in Villers the preceding summer, which he then would have worked up into a finished composition in his Paris studio. Like most artists (but enjoying the extra comforts money made available to him), Boit usually spent his summers with his family in the country, often near the sea. In 1876, after celebrating Ned’s artistic success, the Boits traveled to Etretat, another popular coastal resort in Normandy. There, they kept company with Henry James, who talked about the scene in a letter to his brother William. “The quality of the air is delicious,” he wrote, but “the company is rather low, and I have no one save Edward Boit and his wife (of Boston and Rome) who have taken a most charming old country house for the summer.”28 Ned used the family travels as an opportunity to paint, and their itinerary can be traced in pictures, although he may not have exhibited his work in chronological order. For example, in 1877, Boit showed a watercolor of the Piazza del Popolo at the Salon, but whether it documents a recent trip to Rome or was painted some years earlier is not clear. In that year’s Salon catalogue, he listed only his Paris studio as his address, dropping Rome from his record. None of Boit’s work appeared in the 1878 Salon, although whether or not he
