Like most expatriate girls of their age and class, the Boit daughters were schooled at home under the guidance of a governess or tutor. But academic excellence was not the goal; Wharton later claimed that she “had been taught only two things in [her] childhood: the modern languages and good manners.”44 The girls would have learned languages - certainly French, in which they were all fluent, but also German and Italian. They would have been enrolled in dancing classes, a necessary part of their social education, probably starting their lessons in Paris. The Boits also loved music and each played an instrument, a typical accomplishment for young ladies and a necessary one for domestic entertainment. All of the girls were skilled performers, and they often joined together to present private evening musicales, sometimes with proper programs carefully illustrated by Julia, who had a talent for drawing. They favored pieces by contemporary French and German composers - elegies and nocturnes written for their chosen instruments. Music served as both a pastime and a consolation throughout their lives.
When their portrait was painted in 1882, the Boit sisters would still have been perceived as children. Even the eldest, fourteen-year-old Florie, who leans against the vase in the background, still wears her hair down and her skirt at midcalf, only a bit longer than that of her younger sister Isa, whose skirt falls just below her knee. Some etiquette advisors suggested that girls of thirteen should wear ankle-length dresses, indicating their progression toward adulthood. Then, as now, many girls sought to speed up the process, wearing their hair up and their skirts long - and even adopting corsets - as soon as they could get away with it. How the Boit girls felt about such things is unknown; their cousin Mary was eager to lengthen her skirts when she turned thirteen, as other girls of her age had done, despite (or perhaps because of) the objections of her stepmother.45 If the girls or their mother had kept diaries (and if so, had their journals survived), such questions might be more easily answered. As it is, their father and uncle recorded few such intimate and feminine details. In April 1885, Ned noted that Florie and Jeanie “had their hair done up by Maxine,” presumably in an adult style. In July 1886, he wrote that Isa (mère) had allowed eighteen-year-old Florie to drive after lunch; his entry is marked with an exclamation point, as if the event were a momentous occasion.46 Despite these signs of maturity, the four girls remain forever young in Sargent’s portrait.
The Boits, Sargent, and Children
BY THE TIME Sargent’s work on their daughters’ portrait began, Ned and Isa Boit must have known the artist quite well. Unless Sargent had been thinking about it for some time (and no evidence suggests that he did), the painting sprang into being very quickly. It is equally a portrait and an interior, an homage to modern painting and to the art of the past, and one of Sargent’s greatest works. The exact circumstances surrounding its genesis are unknown; nothing chronicles a formal agreement between painter and patron. Sargent clearly was given considerable artistic freedom with the composition. His portrait was entirely unorthodox, for it is very unusual in a commissioned likeness to obscure the features of two of the sitters. It was made for people who understood both Sargent’s aesthetic sensibility and his artistic ambitions, individuals who had more of a connection to him than clients undertaking a business transaction. The relationship between Sargent and the Boits provides one clue to the painting’s unconventionality.
Ned and Isa had probably first met Sargent in France in the late 1870s. Their social and artistic circles intersected broadly, but it could have been Ned’s teacher François-Louis Français who provided the network that first drew them together. One of Français’s close friends was Carolus-Duran, Sargent’s instructor. Français and Carolus had met when they were both young art students in Paris in the late 1850s; they traveled together in Italy in 1864 and remained good friends for the rest of their lives.47 It seems likely that the path between their two American students, both of whom had Boston connections, would have been a short one. Sargent may also have met the Boits through mutual American friends, among them the Paris-based hostess Etta Reubell, either in the city or in one of a number of summer places, including St. Enogat and St. Malo, where all of them circulated in the 1870s. “Sargent was a great friend of us all,” Julia later explained.48
Before starting the portrait, and since the time he had completed ElJaleo and the Lady with the Rose (Charlotte Louise Burckhardt), Sargent had undertaken two other artistic campaigns that would affect his conception for his large and unusual painting of the Boits. One was a series of Venetian interiors that he created in 1880 and 1882, and the other was a small portrait of Louise Escudier, the wife of a prominent Parisian lawyer. Both had offered Sargent the opportunity to experiment with the placement of figures within a large interior space and to play with the effects of filtered and reflecting light. Many scholars have even suggested that The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, although painted in Paris, was the culmination of Sargent’s Venetian experience.49
The artist made two working trips to Venice in the early 1880s, the first during the fall and winter of 1880-81 and the second during the summer of 1882, after displaying El Jaleo at the Salon and just before starting the Boit portrait. His activities in Venice and the exact chronology of the works he made there remain somewhat obscure, but it is likely that he went with the intention of finding a subject he could work up into a Salon picture, as he had done on many other occasions.50 His 1877 trip to Brittany, for example, resulted in his important oil En route pour la pêche, which he displayed at the 1878 Salon. In the summer of 1878, Sargent went to Capri, a journey that inspired his next Salon picture, Dans les oliviers, à Capri (1879, private collection); in 1879, he went to Spain and Morocco, later producing the exotic North African-inspired Fumée d’ambre gris (1880, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) and El Jaleo, shown at the Salon in 1880 and 1882, respectively. There is every reason to believe that Sargent had in mind to paint a Venetian subject for the Salon.
In September 1880, Sargent refused an invitation from Matilda Paget (the mother of his friend Violet Paget, better known as Vernon Lee), explaining to her that “there may be only a few more weeks of pleasant season here [in Venice] and I must make the most of them ... I must do something for the Salon and have determined to stay as late as possible.” In the summer of 1882, he again wrote to Mrs. Paget from Venice, apologizing that he was unable to visit her in Siena because he was “really bound to stay another month or better two in this place so as not to return to Paris with empty hands.”51 Sargent did not return to Paris entirely empty-handed, but neither did he ever display a major Venetian painting at the Salon. For that traditional venue, he would have needed to paint a large canvas, something worked up in the studio from the smaller paintings and drawings he had completed on-site. The sultry street scenes and shadowy interiors he had finished in Venice were too small, sketchy, and informal for the Salon, although he did show them at other more liberal and forward-thinking venues in both Paris and London.
Sargent’s Venetian paintings were unusual in their concentration on the city’s narrow back streets and its decrepit palaces - shabby interiors that betray few hints of their former richness - and in their deliberate avoidance of familiar tourist vistas. Martin Brimmer, a Boston art patron and one of the founders of the Museum of Fine Arts, called them “half finished ... inspired by the desire of finding what no one else has sought here - unpicturesque subjects, absence of color, absence of sunlight.”52 In part, Sargent’s refusal to record conventional scenes must have come from his search for an unusual subject to build into a Salon painting, one that would capture attention in the way that El Jaleo had done. If The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit can be read as the culmination of his Venetian studies, then the interiors he made there disclose some of the artistic problems he hoped to resolve.
Sargent