This 1882 work by John Singer Sargent, which he painted at age 26 in Paris, remains my very favorite painting in all of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, 14 years after I first discovered it. Sargent was friend with the girls' parents, Edward Darley Boit and Mary Louisa Cushing Boit. According to the MFA website, linked above, they lived abroad thanks to Mary Louisa's inheritance, her family having made its fortune in the China trade (hence the two vases, which MFA visitors can admire in real life on each side of the painting at the museum). They had settled down in the eighth arrondissement of Paris, a neighborhood prized by wealthy American expatriates, and as far as the viewer can judge from the painting, set in the foyer of the family's apartment on the avenue de Friedland, they enjoyed a prosperous lifestyle and the girls lacked nothing. They should've been happy. Yet an ominous feeling lingers in the portrait, with most of the space taken by shadows, that lets the viewer know that all is not what it seems.
I love this painting for two reasons. First, because the setup is so unusual for a group portrait (especially because of the extent of the dark space, and the two girls almost disappearing in it), which has been written about at length by every art commentator. Second, because none of the girls married and both sisters in the shadows ended up afflicted by severe, isolating mental illness. And you look at that painting and wonder whether Sargent had detected something unusual in their behavior, a coolness perhaps, idiosyncrasies, or something in the family dynamics that would prevent even the mentally healthy daughters to start their own families and leave the nest. Something that he would've translated in the distance of the two "sane" girls with each other and their elder siblings, and the shadows around the two elder daughters who would later be swallowed by mental illness. Or perhaps he was simply referring to the isolation of the girls in age and in place - Paris for expatriates speaking a different language, four girls aged four, eight, twelve and fourteen. Perhaps he just got lucky in his interpretation of the family. But he struck a chord with those of us who have had difficult families, relatives who became mentally ill, people who tried to buy the right things - vases, Persian rugs, other tokens of wealth - and ultimately failed at establishing themselves in the upper-class circles they had aspired at getting into. But at least the Boit daughters were left with Sargent's painting, which they donated to the MFA in March 1919.
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