This early piece exemplifies the influence of the Old Masters on Sargent's style. The artist utilizes the atypical square format employed by Diego Velázquez in Las Meninas (1656) and adopts the Spanish painter's approach of capturing the natural essence of his subjects to convey their personalities.
The arrangement of the figures deviates from the conventional group portrait where each individual holds an equal standing. Instead, the girls are positioned seemingly at random throughout the dimly lit, ornately furnished room, surrounded by two large blue and white porcelain vases. Three of the four girls gaze directly at the viewer, while the fourth faces her sister, who wears a matching black and white outfit. The youngest daughter (Julia, aged 4) sits informally on the floor, in stark contrast to the older girls who stand stiffly behind her. The two eldest sisters (Jane, 12, and Florence, 14) are partially obscured in shadow as they stand in the doorway leading to another room. Several critics have observed that the painting transcends its function as a group portrait to symbolize the loss of innocence associated with growing up. Sargent's depiction suggests how people often conceal their true selves behind a façade of manners and etiquette, evoking the restrictive social norms that upper-class women of the time were raised under.
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (originally titled Portraits d'enfants) is a painting by John Singer Sargent. The painting depicts four young girls, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, in their family's Paris apartment. It was painted in 1882 and is now exhibited in the new Art of the Americas Wing of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting hangs between the two tall blue-and-white Japanese vases depicted in the work; they were donated by the heirs of the Boit family.
It has been described as "Arguably the most psychologically compelling painting of Sargent's career". Though the painting's unusual composition was noted from its earliest viewings, initially its subject was interpreted simply as that of girls at play, but it has subsequently been viewed in more abstract terms, reflecting Freudian analysis and a greater interest in the ambiguities of adolescence.
Edward Boit was the son-in-law of John Perkins Cushing and a friend of Sargent's. Boit was an "American cosmopolite" and a minor painter. His wife and the mother of his five children was Mary Louisa Cushing, known as "Isa". Their four daughters were Florence, Jane, Mary Louisa and Julia.
It is not certain whether The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit was commissioned by Boit or painted at Sargent's suggestion. Set in what is thought to be the foyer of Boit's Paris apartment, its dark interior space is reminiscent of those Sargent had recently painted in Venice. The composition was unusual for a group portrait, both for the varying degrees of prominence given to the figures—conventional group portraiture called for an arrangement in which the subjects were portrayed as equally important—and for the square shape of the canvas.
The dimensions may owe something to the influence of Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas, which Sargent had copied, and which presages the geometric format and broad, deep spaces of Sargent's painting. When the painting was first exhibited, contemporary critics, including Henry James, wrote of Sargent's debt to Velázquez.
Art historian Barbara Gallati notes that the English translation of Las Meninas, "Maids-in-Waiting", is an apt description for the activity of the Boit children. Carolus-Duran, Sargent's teacher, had encouraged his students to study the work of Velázquez. The relationship between the works is considered so significant that the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) loaned The Daughters to the Museo del Prado in 2010, so that the paintings could be exhibited together for the first time.
The brushwork of several passages has been seen as deriving from Frans Hals, and nearly contemporaneous works that have been cited for their similarities are Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and, especially for its psychological complexity, The Bellelli Family by Edgar Degas.
Dressed in white pinafores, the children are arranged so that the youngest, four-year-old Julia, sits on the floor, eight-year-old Mary Louisa stands at left, and the two oldest, Jane, aged twelve, and Florence, fourteen, stand in the background, partially obscured by shadow.
In very nearly hiding one of the girl's faces and subjugating the characterization of individuals to more formal compositional considerations, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is as much about the subject of childhood as it is an example of portraiture.
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