The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
By LISA MAEDA

Who knew that a painting with so many people, could feel so lonely?

Influenced by Diego Velásquez, John Singer Sargent painted the four daughters of Edward Darley Boit with the intention of documenting their lives and their lavish household. Instead, Sargent paints a black hole in the Boit’s apartment, which the girls fade into. The painting was positively received, but viewers couldn’t help but criticize the void at the center. Why was it so sinister?

Perhaps Sargent had some insight into the personalities of his subjects. After all, the girls standing in the back, swallowed by the shadows, were the problem children. Florence, on the left, simply rejected the ladylike ideals pressed upon her. She didn’t care to attend any social events, and immersed herself in golf. Her sister on the right, Jane, was a different story. Unstable, physically and emotionally, her outbursts brought her to various mental institutions. The younger girls who stand in the light, Julia and Mary Louisa, lived fairly normal lives, contrasting with their spinster sisters.


Truthfully, this painting makes me feel like an adult. The days of my childhood have long passed, and I’m in a darker, lonelier world than these four girls before me.

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The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

1882



John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
Edward Darley Boit approached Sargent before the Madame X scandal to commission a portrait of his young daughters.  Not only was Sargent one of the most sought-after portraitists of the time, but he, like Boit, was also an American expatriate artist living in Paris.  Perhaps his realization of the Boits' and his common experience led him to commit his own feelings to the canvas, turning a simple commission into something intensely psychological.  In the Boit daughters's portrait, Sargent sees himself and expresses his own uncertainties about the future.

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656
The painting draws inspiration directly from Velázquez's Las Meninas.  Both paintings share similar dimensions (but Daughters is almost exactly square) and use of depth, casting shadows across their subjects.  Each of Boit's daughters poses uniquely, the two youngest in front and the eldest further back.  Two Japanese vases roughly frame the painting, the possessions larger than the girls themselves.  The Boit family donated them along with the painting to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, allowing the viewer to be completely immersed in the scene.

The Daughters maintains a prevailing sense of isolation and unease.  The unconventional composition could be playful in a different execution, but the subdued hues and poses seem to rob the painting of the quiet contentment.  Even the little girl in the foreground looks preoccupied, ignoring her pink doll.  The larger-than-life setting dwarfs the girls, from the strange vases and the tall red divider to the fireplace in the background.  The brushwork is quite good -- look at the light on the leftmost girl's skirt, or the youngest's fine hair -- but the picture seems somehow unsettling.  Perhaps Singer incorporated his own feelings into his art -- uprooted from one's country, the future was too mysterious to contemplate, a dark uncertainty infiltrating the backdrops of his work.

Sargent  entered the painting for the Paris Salon d'Automne in 1883.  Despite some critics accusations that it consisted of "four corners and a void" for its unusual shape and composition, it was well-received.  Would that the Boit daughters had fared so well.  Whatever vague shadows haunted the portrait consumed the sisters later in life.  The younger two remained close, but the older two both developed isolating mental and emotional disturbances.  None of the four ever married.  After a short trip to Madrid to hang alongside its 1656 inspiration in El Prado, the prescient painting was committed to its current museum in Boston, a source of eerie wonder.  The portrait only proves Sargent's deep understanding of his subject and mastery in describing their emotions on the canvas.

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