The Real Story Behind John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit”
John Singer Sargent, "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" (1882). Oil on canvas. 87 3/8 in. (221.93 cm) x 87 5/8 in. (222.57 cm). Located at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
There are some paintings you only need to see once. Maybe it’s on a bucket list to be crossed off, or maybe you can get what you need in one glance, or even sit with it for a while until you get your fill and move on. And then there are other paintings that require repeat visits. Not necessarily because the painting has changed, but because you have.
This is the case for almost everyone I’ve ever met who has seen “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,” the enormous 7’x7’ canvas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They make it a point to come back to this gallery again and again, as they move through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. And visitors don’t just return to marvel at the size of the canvas, or the luscious, painterly brushwork, or the chunky, off-centered composition, but just to, you know, visit the girls in the painting. To bask in four-year-old Julia’s adorable, apple-cheeked sunshine, or to see if teenage Florrie is in a better mood. Because these girls feel that knowable. We can relate to them that authentically. And incredibly, this is accomplished by breaking every rule of portraiture up to this point.
Rule-breaking was essentially what the twenty-six-year-old John Singer Sargent did best when he tackled this portrait commission in 1886. Ned and Isa, the Boit parents, actually hired a Sargent to paint a traditional portrait of their four daughters, but given that they were all friends – and fellow expat Americans living in Paris – they gave him permission to experiment. Portraiture, up to this point, had largely been more about presenting the sitter in the best light possible, both physically and spiritually. Dressed in their finest, holding an item or two of deep meaning, sitters were less authentic renderings of themselves than presenting themselves to the ages. Yet all of this started to change, and modernize, in the late 19th century, when French Realist artists like Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas, and, a generation later, Sargent, began showing their sitters in their much more informal, “unvarnished truth.” To get to the heart of a sitter, you don’t show them in their finest clothes, you show them in their starched white playtime pinafores. After all, you can’t skip around a house – and be truly yourself – in your finest.
Furthermore, an authentic encounter with a sitter meant catching her off-guard, interrupting her, and therefore turning the viewer into a participant in the painting, someone to whom the sitter reacts. And this is what we see happening in this painting: we don’t just come upon these girls, we interrupt them, and all of them respond authentically, each at their own age level. Little Julia sits fully in the light, a wide open, alert, trusting four-year-old. Meanwhile, her sisters grow shyer and more skeptical of our presence as the paintings recede back into darkness. Eight-year-old Mary Louisa stands to Julia’s left, watchful but polite, with her hands behind her back and one foot tentatively forward – a subtle nod to Degas’ adolescent dancer series. The teenagers then hang back in the shadows. Twelve-year-old Jane confronts us directly, while fourteen-year-old Florrie leans against a huge Chinese vase, completely turned away from us. There’s no parroting mother’s manners here, like her little sisters do. Like with any self-respecting adolescent, if we want to know who she is, we have to work for it.
Edgar Degas, "Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer" (original model 1878–81, cast after 1921). Bronze, gauze and satin. Total height: 40.8 in (103.7 cm). Located at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The fact that we feel as though we can easily walk into this space is another barrier removed from traditional portraiture. We as viewers are so acknowledged that we can be ignored. The painting is placed at ground level and recedes into darkness; its composition is inherently enigmatic. Described by a contemporary critic as “four corners and a void,” it is an indeterminate, liminal space between domestic scene and a portrait, yet inadequately fulfilling the aesthetic roles of either: the space itself is dark and cut off and blocks our eye as it tries to sweep across the canvas, and shadows obscure the face of one of the sitters. It’s not quite a domestic scene and not quite a portrait, and yet manages to do both with complete authenticity.
Yet for a painting so radically new, it’s also deeply rooted in the past. Sargent, like most late 19th century painters, particularly those fresh out of art school, looked to the Old Masters. He was particularly taken with the 17th c. Spanish painter, Diego Velazquez, and even traveled to the Prado Museum in Spain in 1879 to sketch copies of Velazquez’s masterwork, “Las Meninas” from 1656. And the influence, if you hold “Las Meninas” up to the Boit Daughters, is quite clear. Though the story that Velazquez depicts is significantly more regal – the poised little Spanish infanta surrounded by her entourage – we feel the same sense of walking into a scene that is already in progress, with or without our presence, but that our presence influences. The infanta shows off her dress with sweet tentativeness. The maids don’t have time to bother with us as they primp her. Meanwhile, there’s an oblique reference to the girl’s parents in the background, who, like the large Chinese Boit vases, acts as a reminder that the little girl simply exists in the world that they provide for her.
Diego Velazquez, "Las Meninas" (1656). Oil on canvas. 126.2 in. (320.5 cm) x 110.8 in. (281.5). Located at the Museo del Prado.
And perhaps these vases best tell the story of the painting itself. When they were donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, along with the canvas, curators found inside them a motley collection of ticket stubs, candy wrappers, and all the other little bits of trash you’d expect to be casually tossed into a giant vase in a house full of little girls, where no one would ever think to look. The fact that we see Florrie just casually leaning against this priceless vase, and that the girls used it as a trash receptacle, just speaks to its own casual existence in their home, how it was simply part of the domestic landscape. The vase is no more part of the art historical ages than these girls are. And maybe this explains why visitors are so keen to revisit them. When else can you revisit such an authentic representation of childhood? Who would miss a chance to see kids being kids, not objects on display, not pretending to be perfect for the sake of the ages, while they still can?
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