MICHELE MCDONALD FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Erica Hirshler in front of John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’’ at the Museum of Fine Arts. She has written a book about the famous painting. (Michele Mcdonald for The Boston Globe
)
G FORCE | ERICA HIRSHLER
Studying ‘The Daughters’
MICHELE MCDONALD FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
Erica Hirshler in front of John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’’ at the Museum of Fine Arts. She has written a book about the famous painting. (Michele Mcdonald for The Boston Globe
)
John Singer Sargent’s “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit’’ is one of the most popular paintings in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Erica Hirshler has been looking at it - and watching the reactions of other people looking at it - for over 30 years. A senior curator of American paintings at the MFA, she has now written a book, “Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting,’’ which tells everything she knows about it, and relishes what she does not know.
Q. Why do you think the painting has such a beguiling effect?
A. The girls seem so vivid and alive, as if they were in our own space - it’s hard not to respond to their presence. The painting is very accessible in that way, but it’s mysterious enough for people to create their own stories about it.
Q. Henry James thought the picture astonishing. Did others at the time appreciate it?
A. Many appreciated it - for its painterly skill, its immediacy, and its lack of sentimentality in portraying the children. But others were confounded by it, finding it odd that the girls were so separate from one another, and that the shadowy setting was so sketchy and vague. One critic called it “four corners and a void.’’
Q. What do you think is going on in the picture? Are the girls just playing a game, or are they up to no good?
A. It’s been interpreted both ways - James and other writers who knew the Boit family called it a picture of children at play, but some modern viewers, struck by the girls’ intense gazes, feel that the girls must have been interrupted in the midst of some trick they were about to play. I think it might be Sargent who was playing a game - setting himself a puzzle to solve about how to paint white in different kinds of light.
Q. Posing is arduous. Do you think Sargent may have had a hard time getting them to cooperate?
A. It seems as if Sargent painted this big canvas very quickly, so maybe it wasn’t difficult. Sargent was a friend of the family, and their father was also a painter, so they may have been more comfortable in an artist’s studio, or had a better understanding of what was expected of them.
Q. What became of the girls?
A. The Boits were a close-knit family, and they stayed together for most of the rest of their lives. None of them married. Florence, the eldest one who leans against the vase, acted as a hostess and companion to her widowed father until he died in 1915. She was an athletic and vibrant woman, but she died first, in France in 1919, just after World War I. Jane, who stands in the shadows, suffered from mental illness, and while she remained close to her family, she lived apart. The two youngest girls, Mary Louisa and Julia lived together; Mary Louisa died in 1945, but Julia lived to age 91. Julia was an accomplished watercolor painter herself, though she never made it her profession.
Sebastian Smee can be reached at ssmee@globe.com 
© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
