The daughters of Edward Darley Boit
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John Singer Sargent , 1882
221.9 × 222.6 cm
Oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit , ( English The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit ), is a painting by John Singer Sargent from the year 1882. The picture, executed in oil on canvas, has a height of 221.9 cm and a width of 222, 6 cm. The four daughters of a couple who are friends with Sargent are shown in an interior of their Parisian house. The picture is one of the artist's main works and shows clear parallels to the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez , which Sargent had copied a few years earlier in Madrid . In the Salon de Paris in 1883 there were both positive and negative reviews for the picture. It belongs to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston .
Image description
The painting, measuring 221.9 cm × 222.6 cm, is oil on canvas and shows the four daughters of Edward Darley Boit and his wife. From left to right you can see eight-year-old Mary Louisa, fourteen-year-old Florence, twelve-year-old Jane and four-year-old Julia sitting in front. Sargent placed the girls in the entrance hall of a Parisian house. The hall floor occupies the foreground of the picture. While parquet can be seen on the left, a gray carpet with brownish ornaments in the middle and a blueish meander pattern on the edges is on the right. Sargent's signature and the year 1882 are located in the area of the carpet lower right. The carpet has been cut from the lower and lateral edges of the picture. The transition from carpet to parquet is laid out as a diagonal line.
The youngest child Julia is sitting on the carpet. She wears a white dress that reaches to her knees with black stockings. Between her outstretched legs lies a doll that she holds with her hands. Julia has straight blonde hair that is cut into a pony hairstyle at the front and falls on the sides and back down to her dress. Your gaze goes forward with your eyes wide open. On the left edge of the picture is the daughter Mary Louisa, who has the same first name as her mother. She stands close to a brownish wall with her hands clasped behind her back and is shown from the front. She wears a knee-length red dress with a white apron tied over it. She too has blonde hair that falls over her shoulders. It's a little more curly than her sister Julia's hair. Mary Louisa also looks ahead.
Behind the carpet, the room opens into a dark area that is flanked by two tall Japanese vases, the right vase being cut off from the edge of the picture. These vases - in white with a blue decoration - tower above all children, including the two oldest girls, who are in the center of the picture next to the left vase. The two daughters Florence and Jane wear black dresses with tied white aprons. These dresses are also knee-length and they too wear black stockings. While Jane is also painted from the front, looking forward and letting her arms hang down to the sides, sister Florence is portrayed from the side. She has leaned her back against the vase and her eyes seem to go down. Jane and Florence stand at the transition from the light foreground to the dark background. While the light is still falling on Jane's face, Florence's face is already in shadow. The hair of the two girls is dark and the contours can hardly be seen against the almost black background. Behind the right vase is a red screen, which is also cut from the right edge of the picture. In the dark background, a mirror hangs on an indefinite wall that reflects the light from a window that must be behind the viewer. Light reflections from this window can also be found on the two vases.
Sargent did not portray the four girls playing with each other. Even if the youngest child is holding a doll, it remains unclear what these girls are doing in this place. The large, empty areas in the foreground appear strange. The entrance hall forms the transition from the outside world to the private world of the house, but it is usually not the place where children stay longer. The presentation of the older girls with the aprons leaves open whether it is a school uniform or casual clothing. The four siblings do not interact with one another, but rather remain rigidly in their position like the decorative vases. The portrayal of the eldest daughter Florence is also unusual for a commissioned portrait. Almost immersed in the dark background, her face can hardly be seen.
About the creation of the painting
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John Singer Sargent, the son of American parents, lived in Europe most of the time. The group portrait of the Boit daughters was created in autumn 1882 while he was living in Paris. Like the parents of the children depicted, Sargent was in a circle of friends that included many Americans living in Europe, including the writer Henry James . Edward Darley Boit was from Boston and was originally a lawyer. His wife, Mary Louisa Cushing Boit, had inherited a sizable fortune derived from trade with China. This wealth allowed the family to live abroad. You had first visited Paris in 1867 and loved the city. After living in Rome for some time and spending several summers in Normandy and Brittany , they finally settled in Paris in 1878, where Edward Darley Boit began to work as a landscape painter . The family lived in an elegant house at 32 avenue de Friedland , the entrance hall of which served as the backdrop for the painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit .
The exact circumstances in which the order was placed with Sargent are not known. Presumably the Boits had initially thought of a conventional portrait of their children. Sargent was able to convince the client to paint a rather unusual work that combines the two subjects of group portrait and interior picture. It is possible that the Boits were familiar with the painting Las Meninas by Velázquez, which served as the model for the portrait of the Boit girls. Sargent had visited the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 1879 and copied several works by Velázquez, including Las Meninas . The parallels between the two images are evident. The picture by Velázquez is also a monumental painting measuring 318 cm × 276 cm, with a group of girls in the center. The choice of colors and lighting are also similar in both paintings, and the detail of a mirror on the dark back wall can also be found in both paintings. In addition, Sargent also borrowed from other pictures by Velázquez. The posture of Julia Boit sitting in the foreground is reminiscent of the pictures that Velázquez created of the court dwarfs Sebastián de Morra and Don Diego de Acedo.
The painting was first shown in an exhibition in Georges Petit's gallery in December 1882 . The picture was initially titled Portrait d'enfants ( Child Portrait ), and the first reviews were positive. The picture was then exhibited in the annual Salon de Paris in the spring of 1883 . Here the reviews were very different and ranged from his friend Henry James , who found the portrayal of the children "lovely", to a critic who was not known by name, who described the picture as "four corners and an emptiness". For the American art critic William Crary Brownell saw in the painting The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit Sargent as the brought to life Velázquez.
After the death of their parents, the four Boit sisters depicted gave the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
See also
literature
- Gary Tinterow , Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez, The French Taste for Spanish Painting . Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2003, ISBN 1-58839-038-1 .
- Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 . National Gallery, London 2006, ISBN 1-85709-301-1 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Occasionally there are deviations in the dimensions in the literature and on the Internet, which can result from the conversion from inches to centimeters. The information in the text comes from Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 , p. 257.
- ^ Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 , p. 257.
- ↑ Gary Tinterow, Genevieve Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , S. 533rd
- ↑ Edward Darley Boit wrote in his diary after his first visit to Paris that the city impressed him more every day ("grandeur grows on me daily"). In Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 , p. 74.
- ^ Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 , p. 74.
- ↑ Gary Tinterow, Genevieve Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , S. 533rd
- ↑ Gary Tinterow, Genevieve Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , S. 534th
- ^ Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860-1900 , p. 76.
- ^ "That he is Velasquez come to life again" in Gary Tinterow, Geneviève Lacambre: Manet / Velázquez , p. 299.
- ↑ Exhibited in the museum as a “Gift from Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father Edward Darley Boit” in Kathleen Adler: Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 , p. 257.