Together, Ned and Isa Boit lived a deliberately peripatetic life. They began their marriage by dividing their time between Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, where both of them had many connections through family and friends. They built a summer home in Newport, “The Rocks,” which sat above Bailey’s Beach on property adjacent to that of the bride’s brother, Robert Cushing. Children came quickly, and not only daughters. Their first child, a son, was born in April 1865; he was named Edward after his father and was always known as Neddie. But even with the excitement of the baby, the prospect of keeping to a routine of winters in Boston and summers in Newport or Cotuit, on Cape Cod, apparently seemed dreary. The Civil War had ended and traveling was now much less hazardous. In 1866, just after Ned was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar and while Isa was pregnant for the second time, the Boits sailed for Europe, appropriately enough on a vessel named the China.
Their itinerary was structured around Ned’s interest in art, an avocation that his wife’s comfortable inheritance would soon allow him to pursue. The first stop on their ambitious itinerary was Dublin, where Ned inspected William Frith’s detailed study of the varied crowds in the train shed at Paddington, The Railway Station (1862, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College); Boit proclaimed it to be “by far the best painting I [have] ever seen.” They traveled on to London, where they stayed with Ned’s aunt Julia and her husband Russell Sturgis, another Boston merchant related to the Cushings who had once been deeply involved in the China Trade, but who was now an important partner at the banking firm Baring Brothers in London. There, Ned visited the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, the show of British Water Color Painters, various art galleries and museums, and the panoply of exhibitions on display at the Crystal Palace, the great iron and glass hall devoted to shows about science, exploration, art, and industry. He found the setting, Joseph Paxton’s industrial masterpiece, to be “an immense building of dingy glass, like a huge conservatory - but lacking ... the smell of flowers ... [it] is like the inside of a circus tent - redolent of animals, food, and above all of a crowd.”19 Mechanics fairs and technology were things Americans could see at home, and clearly Boit was unimpressed; he had come to Europe to see less familiar sights, especially paintings.
Boit was not an uncultured man, but simply an American who had had little opportunity at home to study the visual arts. It was a common problem, for there were few places to see great art in the United States before the Civil War. Boston’s art scene in the 1850s and 1860s was haphazard. The Museum of Fine Arts did not yet exist, and the collections at the Boston Athenæum, a combination library and art gallery, then consisted largely of ambitious portraits and historical scenes by American painters; only the two grand Roman interiors by Giovanni Paolo Panini and a large still life by the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Boel stood out as European masterworks from the numerous copies of famous compositions by Guido Reni and others.20 Boston’s private collections, to which Boit had easy access, held some treasures, but most featured contemporary pieces, principally canvases by Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and other artists of the Barbizon School whose paintings were most favored by Boston’s taste-makers. To appreciate the old masters, Boit needed to travel abroad.
Ned was attempting to instruct his eye, which he knew lacked the sophistication that studying Europe’s masterpieces could provide. Like many Americans on tour, the Boits also went shopping, purchasing several paintings for the home they were making in Newport. The works they selected were, if unadventurous in spirit, typical for the period - a Cairo sunset by Charles-Theodore Frère, two small paintings by Richard Ansdell (best known for his depictions of dogs), a rural landscape with cattle by William Shayer, a large landscape by Henry Bright. When Ned Boit visited the National Gallery in London in June, he remarked that he “was not yet educated up to Turner,” adding that while he found the British landscapist J.M.W. Turner’s earlier works beautiful, he felt that they all exhibited “a studied neglect of drawing - as if color were the only thing in which excellence was to be aimed at.” He stated that he would “reserve [his] humble opinion” of the old masters “until I am able - by an inspection of many of their pictures - to really understand the peculiarities and peculiar merits of each,” since, he admitted, he “was disappointed in the gallery - it was neither so large nor so choice as I had supposed - one room was devoted to paintings on gold in the Fra Angelico style - not one of which I - in my present uncultured state - would hang on my walls.”21
From England in July 1866, the Boits traveled to Boulogne, Paris, and Dijon before heading through Switzerland and Germany. In the fall, they returned to England, where Isa bore their second son, John, in October. Isa did not make a quick recovery and the baby was sickly, but they continued their travels. By mid-December they were back in Paris, where Ned visited the Louvre and the exhibition rooms at Goupil’s, the leading art dealer in the city. His appreciation of the French capital developed on this second visit, and he wrote that the more he “saw of Paris the more convinced I am that my first impressions of it were erroneous. Its grandeur grows on me daily.”22 Despite Ned’s attraction to the city, he was determined to keep traveling toward the destination that had long been celebrated as the culmination of the grand tour: Italy.
The Boits passed through Genoa and Florence to Rome, where they spent the spring of 1867. A sizeable American community existed there in the 1860s, anchored in the picturesque Palazzo Barberini apartments of the famous American Neoclassical sculptor William Wetmore Story and his wife, Emelyn. The Storys, like the Boits, were well-connected Bostonians, with many friends and relatives in common (among them, Ned and Isa’s recent hosts in London, the Sturgises). Ned and Isa joined their compatriots in rounds of social events and for sightseeing excursions to ancient monuments in the city and on the Campagna, where the classical ruins made a haunting and picturesque vista. Despite the illnesses of both Isa and their baby son John, who died in March 1867 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Ned made sure to complete the artistic education he had planned. He visited the Vatican to see the famous works of Raphael and Michelangelo and traveled to Naples, Pompeii, and Venice; he especially enjoyed the paintings of Domenichino in Rome and Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin at the Church of the Frari in Venice. But Isa’s health remained fragile, and soon the Boits, with their young son Neddie, were on their way home to Boston and Newport. Ned resumed his legal career, opening an office in Pemberton Square, the headquarters of many of Boston’s most prestigious law firms.
In 1868, Ned Boit’s artistic epiphany came when he visited an exhibition of landscapes that included paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot at Boston’s Soule and Ward Gallery. The naturalism of Corot’s imagery and his ability to capture light, air, and atmosphere astonished Boit, and he resolved to follow his heart and become an artist. Brother Bob later confessed that Ned seemed at “rather an advanced age to begin [a new career] - but for the first time in his life he has found something which is really absorbing to him + the only occupation he has ever devoted himself to with zeal + industry.”23 Like so many aspiring American painters of the age, Ned planned to study art abroad. Isa Boit enthusiastically supported (both emotionally and financially) the idea of living in Europe, which she much preferred to Boston or Newport, and thus Ned was able to leave the law behind him.
By the time they began organizing their move, the family had grown again to three children. Florence was born in Newport on May 6, 1868, and Jane had arrived on January 17, 1870, also in Newport. But these joys were tempered, for Ned and Isa were now faced with the heartbreaking task of splitting up their family and leaving their firstborn son, Neddie, behind. It must have been a challenging period for all of them, despite the advice they received from the best physicians. Neddie clearly was not normal. “At the age of two he could talk,” recalled Bob Boit. “Then he suddenly stopped, lost his intelligence, and became an idiot - and when [he was] 5 or 6 years old [he] had to be sent from home for the sake of the other children.” The Boits found a place for him in Barre, Massachusetts, at a private boarding school