The complaint was put to him, “There is nothing in the work that reveals to us the meaning of the allegory.”
He replied, “Well, my dream cannot be apprehended, it requires no allegory; being a musical poem; it needs no libretto, the essential quality of a work consists precisely in what is not expressed.” Indeed, the canvas does have a musical feel, a strumming, a vibrato. The sweep of the blues, the green, the off-citron yellow are like parts of a musical Beethoven cello riff.
Gauguin’s comments help one to understand the painting. The Buddha-like figure is make-believe; the moon goddess Hina, based on Asian prototypes.
The old lady on the left is death. Gauguin says, “This woman appears to accept everything, to resign herself to her thoughts. She completes the story! At her feet, a strange white bird holding a lizard in its claws.”
Gauguin agitated over the painting’s reception at home. He repainted parts of it separately and sent them to Paris for sale.
The avant-garde critics praised it. Critics today are mostly appreciative of it. Sister Wendy — a nun and famous author of thirty-five art books — thinks this a triumph.
The work is certainly a challenge to what went before. Gauguin’s sweeping statement may apply, “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” Strange, three disturbed personalities created new forms of art: Cézanne — Cubism; Van Gogh — Expressionism; Gaugin — Primitivism, the Fauves.
JP
11. The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882)
John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)
John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882
Oil on canvas, 221.9 x 222.6 cm
Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit, 1919 (19.124)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Sargent is not mentioned in some of the art books that survey highlights. I’m not sure why — perhaps because he was a “popular” painter, bridging the gap between the Old Masters and Impressionism. He spent much of his youth in Europe. His first success was in the Paris Salon in 1879. That year he spent weeks copying Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the Prado. A friend of Monet, whom he admired, Sargent didn’t do Impressionism, however. His painting is lush, in the tradition of Delacroix. He spanned generations of art styles, starting in 1878, finishing in 1925. His works had a sense of flamboyant theatre. Henry James, another friend, said of him that “he was a knock down insolence of talent.”
Hard-working, prolific, and charming, Sargent made his money from painting the nouveau riche. He conveyed assurance with his fluid paint reflecting the confident well-dressed rich.
This large portrait (7 ft x 7 ft) of the four daughters of Edward Darley Boit is so striking that you stop dead before it. The painting — its dark shadows, the gleam of the vase, and the smear of the white pinafore dresses — is lush, a feast that stays with you for at least a week after your museum visit.
It is reminiscent of Las Meninas . Each child seems oddly isolated in this dark cavern of a room — almost a tomb — with the two Japanese vases. Yet the carpet, the sitting four-year-old child’s warmth, and the red screen set off the lushness and the sheer feeling of the starched white pinafores.
The four girls look like a difficult lot. Are these precocious children destined for original lives or an over-coddled disaster? Perhaps they intuit that the vases, vases that Boit, an art collector, took with him wherever he travelled, may have been more important than they are.
The eldest hides about the vase, not really in view, but relatively blank; the standing girl on the left is precocity itself; and the youngest sits just looking. Sister Wendy feels it is a portrait of a dysfunctional family.
In 2010, the Prado in Madrid exhibited this next to Las Meninas . It was quite a sight as Sargent’s painting stood up to the mighty Prado’s treasure.
What happened to these girls? A recent book, Sargent’s Daughters: A Biography of a Painting by Erica Hirshler, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells us.
The parents: Mary Louisa Cushing, an heiress, and Edward Boit, a “courtly” lawyer, simply retired. They lived in Boston and Paris. He stopped his law practice and pursued watercolours with success. There is a watercolour of Venice by Boit (1911) in the Boston Museum.
None of the four daughters married. The eldest, Florence, with her back to the vase, rebelled and didn’t revel in the social whirl that the mother loved. “Florie” took up golf and lived with a cousin. Jane, the standing girl on the right, required nursing care in Paris. Mary Louisa (standing left) and Julia (the youngest — four years old) returned to Newport from Paris after many years. Julia was a good amateur watercolourist. In 1919, the four women gave the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts in memory of their father.
And Sargent? He declined a knighthood from Britain because he was an American citizen. At sixty-nine, he died successful and single. At death, he was reading Voltaire’s Dictionnaire Philosophique.
JP
12. Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and
Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840)
Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840
Oil on canvas, 90.8 x 122.6 cm
Henry Lillie Pierce Fund (99.22)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
I always look at Turner because he has an endless capacity to surprise. You cannot figure out the timing of his paintings as there wasn’t a logical sequence. He was doing things before the Impressionists had even thought of such innovations.
The slave ship, Zong, en route from Guinea to Jamaica in 1781, threw overboard sick and dying slaves so that the ship’s owners could collect insurance money available only for slaves “lost at sea.”
The owners of the Zong sued the ship’s underwriters for the value of 132 Africans, thrown overboard because the ship became short of water. They argued that to save the healthy, the ill had to be killed. The trial was before a jury in 1873, which found that the underwriters had to pay £30 for each slave.
There was an appeal to the King’s Bench before Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and two others. Mansfield had been an attorney general. He was a foremost debater, a rival to William Pitt. As chief justice, he was a creator of English commercial law and was noted for his finding that slavery was “so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it.”
No doubt the ship owners lied. It was cheaper for them to kill the slaves and claim insurance — as simple as that. There appeared to be evidence that, although the ship was off course, there was water. The appeal makes for uncomfortable reading. One counsel said regarding slaves as property (see Gregson v. Gilbert (1873), 3 Douglas’ King’s Bench Reports 232 at 629):
It has been decided, whether wisely or unwisely is not now the question, that a portion of our fellow creatures may become the subject of property. This therefore, was a throwing overboard of goods, and of part to save the residue. The question is, first, whether any necessity existed for that act.
The underwriters argued:
The truth was, that finding