summer at Dinard, in Brittany, another favorite seaside resort. Boit exhibited an oil painting of the banks of the Rance estuary between Dinard and St. Malo (along with watercolors of Mont St. Michel and of St. Peter’s in Rome) at the Salon in 1879 (locations unknown). Soon after that show ended, flush with success, Ned and his family embarked for Boston. The trip was their first return to the United States in eight years.29
Ned and Isa now had two more daughters to bring home, along with Florence and Jane. Mary Louisa, nicknamed Isa like her mother, was born in Paris on June 5, 1874, and Julia, the youngest, on November 15, 1878, in Soisy, a community north of Paris near Enghiens-le-Bain, a spa town boasting mineral baths and a casino. The Boits were planning an extended trip home, at least in part to introduce baby Julia, whom her grandparents and uncle had never seen, to the family. “Mama & pater,” wrote Bob Boit in 1879, referring to his parents, had hastened from Boston to Newport to prepare their house for “the coming of Ned + Isa, four children, nurses, maids, + governesses - who were expected early in June - + were coming directly to Mama’s to pass the summer ... As they had been abroad for eight years Mama & pater were specially anxious to have them pleased on their return with all their surroundings - in hopes, I think, of keeping them on this side of the water.” The family was close-knit, and it was hard for them to be separated. Ned’s parents had spent a year in Europe in 1874-75, arriving there just before Mary Louisa’s birth. Bob was immensely sad that his brother had never met his own beloved wife, Georgia Mercer Boit, who died of a fever in 1878, four years after their marriage. He eagerly anticipated his brother’s visit. Ned arrived in New York with his family on the SS Bothnia in mid-June 1879, and soon Bob announced that he had “seen Ned + Isa + their children. The two former have changed very little in the last eight years - with the exception that Ned is a little grayer + Isa is a little stouter + not quite so young looking ... I looked over Ned’s water color sketches - many of them lovely - which I had not seen before. [I] heard Isa’s Florie play her violin to Isa’s accompaniment + altogether enjoyed being with the family again.”30 Florie was now eleven years old; her youngest sister, Julia, was an infant of seven months. The girls would have spent most of their time that summer in the care of the European nurses and governesses who had accompanied the family on their journey, providing them not only with assistance and education but also with continuity and a personal connection to their more familiar Parisian world.
The summer passed with a merry round of activities, but despite Ned’s parents’ hopes that he would stay in the United States through the winter, he returned to Europe with his family in early October 1879. The American experiment had failed, as brother Bob related:
Just [at] this time Ned + Isa who had been passing quite a gay summer at Newport staying with all their family at Pater’s, decided to gather up their belongings + return to Europe + to Paris at once - taking passage on the 8th Oct. This quite upset me. I had looked forward so much to Ned’s companionship this winter ... making me feel very blue. However Ned explained all his reasons - pecuniary + otherwise - to me, and on the whole I thought he could not do better, or that to say the least it was natural he should have done as he did.31
Wanderlust was certainly among the reasons the Boits refused to stay in America, along with the luxurious apartments and entertainments that they enjoyed more easily and affordably in France than in the United States. But the appeal of the French capital was more than economic; the lure of Paris’s cultural scene, especially for an artist like Boit, was simply too strong. Ned felt that Paris was the only appropriate place for him to earn his credentials as a painter. He arranged for a group of his watercolors to be sold at auction at the Boston gallery Williams and Everett after his departure. The catalogue discussed the works as “original studies from nature,” and the titles summarized the Boits’ travels throughout the preceding period, from Brittany to Mont St. Michel to the outskirts of Paris, from Florence to Rome to Sorrento. The progression from place to place became a lifelong pattern, but Paris became the Boits’ real home.
Paris
IN FRANCE, the Boits joined an international community. Expatriates from the United States, South America, and throughout Europe found professional and social opportunities in Paris more attractive than anywhere else in the world. This stylish and sophisticated city had become a magnet for artists lured by its many opportunities for training and display; for intellectuals excited by its urbane and often witty exchange of ideas; for physicians and scientists seeking the latest experimental developments in their field; for statesmen engaged in diplomacy, at this time always conducted in French; and for entrepreneurs eager to provide shoppers at home with the latest luxury goods. People came from around the world to settle in Paris, but the most numerous, and the wealthiest, expatriate residents of the city were Americans. Some of them had discovered that an address in the most cosmopolitan of capitals was advantageous for business; others were drawn to its position at the center of the world of art, society, fashion, and entertainment; many discovered that their money bought more there than it did in the United States. Paris was also one of the world’s most modern cities; since midcentury, the French government had created a new metropolis of broad avenues and luxurious apartments punctuated by historic sites, relentlessly demolishing parts of the old capital, with its maze of twisting dark streets. The disruptions and unrest of the early 1870s had quickly been overcome; by the time the Boits settled in Paris, the city had easily re-established itself as the acknowledged center of shopping, dining, and artistic pursuits of all kinds. This elixir, with its mix of nationalities and entertainments, was addictive. As American portraitist Cecilia Beaux reported of one Mrs. Green, who lived in the Americans’ favorite quarter near the Etoile, “I never knew why [she] chose to spend her life in Paris ... perhaps, though she was a Shaw of Boston, and a ‘loyal subject,’ she found that, having once tasted, she could not do without the ‘milk of Paradise’ which many feel is to be found where she elected to remain.”32
When Bob Boit visited his brother and sister-in-law in Paris, he tasted that milk of paradise, keeping a diary of his daily activities. No doubt some special efforts were made to introduce him to the city’s many diversions, but the events the brothers experienced together that summer were not so different from the family’s regular routine and thus reveal many of the things the Boits enjoyed about life in Paris. One day, the brothers went shopping and took a drive through the Latin Quarter, stopping at the Luxembourg Gardens for a stroll before a late lunch at the fashionable Café de la Paix, on the boulevard des Capucines. The rest of the afternoon was spent at home and the evening at the new Opéra, where they heard the famed American soprano Emma Eames, a friend of Ned and Isa’s, sing her celebrated leading role in Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. After the performance, they returned to the Café de la Paix for a beer, taking pleasure in watching the bustle of the passing crowd. The next day, they went shopping again and then to the Louvre, where Bob Boit was particularly impressed with the paintings of Van Dyck, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Titian. Lunch followed at the Café d’Orleans in the Palais Royale, and then the brothers played billiards before returning home. In the evening, they dined at the renowned Café Anglais on the boulevard des Italiens and went to the theater at the Comédie Français.33
Among the many pleasures the Boits savored in Paris was the food, which Bob, like so many visitors, enumerated in rapturous detail. Of one meal at the famous Maison Dorée, a restaurant popular with a bourgeois and artistic clientele (and the location of the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in 1886), Bob exclaimed, “Who would have supposed that the simple, vulgar turnip contained hidden from all but these blessed Frenchmen such a delicate aromatic flavor! What is the telegraph to such a discovery as that! ... thine be the palm, Oh, paper-capped chef, for taking a miserable common thing that has been served to swine for thousands of years + extracting there[from] a god-like essence to be treated with respect for ever + never
