|
|
 |
Paris as Proving Ground: Part I |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
Oil on canvas; 87 3/8 x 87 5/8 in. (221.9 x 222.6 cm)
Galerie Georges Petit, 1882; Salon, 1883;
Exposition Universelle, 1889
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit
|
|
|
Boston painter Edward Darley Boit (1842–1916) and his wife lived in Paris for extended periods. It is not known whether they commissioned this portrait of their four daughters or if their friend Sargent undertook it at his own initiative. In his most ambitious and psychologically compelling portrait to date, he shows the girls in the spacious foyer of the Boits' apartment in the elegant eighth arrondissement. Dressed in play clothes, they seem disconnected from one another; two are almost lost in the shadows. At the 1883 Salon critics found the picture curious and even disturbing; one described it as "four corners and a void." Yet writer Henry James praised it as a "view of a rich, dim, rather generalized French interior . . . which encloses the life and seems to form the happy playground of a family of charming children."
|
|
|
|
|
|
