221.93 x 222.57 cm (87 3/8 x 87 5/8 in.)
Oil on canvas

Inscriptions: Lower right: John S. Sargent 1882

Classification: Paintings

On view in the: Susan Morse Hilles Gallery (American Impressionism)

Described by a close friend as an "accentless mongrel," John Singer Sargent felt at home in many lands. Born in Italy to American expatriates from Philadelphia, Sargent began his career in France, established it in England, and earned his greatest acclaim in the United States. Although eager to prove himself as a portraitist, Sargent always set himself new artistic challenges. In Paris, London, and New York, he exhibited a deliberate succession of different kinds of paintings that announced both his skill and his audacity. He showed The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit at the Paris Salon in 1883.

The exact circumstances surrounding Sargent's commission to paint this portrait remain unknown. Edward Boit was a well-to-do Bostonian who had studied law before deciding to pursue a career as a painter. He and his wife Mary Louisa Cushing Boit lived in Boston and Paris with their four daughters-Mary Louisa, who was eight years old when Sargent painted her, Florence (age fourteen), Jane (twelve), and Julia (four). The Boits met Sargent in Paris, and while they may have first approached him to create a traditional portrait, they supported his ambition to paint a bold masterpiece, even allowing him to obscure Florence's features.

Sargent, like many artists of his age, greatly admired the work of the seventeenth-century Spanish master Diego Velazquez. In composing this painting, Sargent recalled Velazquez's Las Meninas, a famous portrait of a young princess with her maids that he had copied during a trip to Spain. Sargent adapted Velazquez's mysterious spaces, his silvery gray palette, and the way his princess directly confronts the viewer. Sargent posed the Boit girls in the elegant interior of their Parisian apartment, using as props the two large Japanese porcelain vases that traveled with the family back and forth across the Atlantic. The daughters are dressed alike in casual clothes, but only the youngest engages the viewer, while the older girls recede progressively into the shadows, becoming increasingly indistinct.
While some have interpreted Sargent's strategy as a poignant comment on the fickle nature of childhood and adolescence, writer Henry James described the picture as a "happy play-world of a family of charming children" when he saw it at the Salon. Other critics were perplexed by Sargent's composition, with its large open spaces that leave some of the girls scattered in the background. The painting masterfully transcends portraiture, presenting not only a likeness but also a brilliant meditation on openness and enigma, on light and shadow. Sargent's interest in the effects of light and in the psychology of modern life led him to explore Impressionism more fully, and he would later become one of its important advocates.

This text was adapted from Davis, et al., MFA Highlights: American Painting (Boston, 2003) available at www.mfashop.com/mfa-publications.html.

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, 1919
Accession number: 19.124

Provenance/Ownership History: The artist; to Edward Darley Boit, Paris, 1882; to his daughters, the sitters; to MFA, 1919, gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Florence D. Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Julia Overing Boit.

This object is included in the following Selected Tour(s):

• American Paintings
• American Paintings Highlights
• Director's Choice Audio Tour
• MFA Images: Portraiture
• MFA Images: MFA Icons
• MFA Images: Childhood
• Draft: 100 Works for World Children
• MFA Images: Mobile
• Wallpaper
• Archival Replicas: Brilliant American Paintings
• MFA Images: Family Room