John Singer Sargent - The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit [1882]

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 travelled 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.

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.

[Oil on canvas, 221.93 x 222.57 cm]