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John Singer Sargent, "The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" - $150 (Amherst)
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Professionally Framed Print of this famous masterpiece at the MFA Boston
27"X27"
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The image doesn't do justice to this picture but it's the best my phone camera could do. Better images can be easily found by Google search.
FROM:
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.