Дочери Эдварда Дарли Бойта: Психологический портрет семьи

Painting by John Singer Sargent

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (originally titled Portraits d'enfants) is a painting by the American artist 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, which 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. 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.

When the painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1882 and 1883, critics were struck by the oddness of the composition and "wooden forms" of the figures. In 1887, Henry James described the painting as representing a "happy play world of charming children;" his uncomplicated reading went largely unchallenged for nearly a century. While today's audiences have sometimes assumed that the girls are engaged in some sort of clandestine activity, in Sargent's day the most frequent notion was that they had simply been playing. The pinafores were certainly appropriate garments for girls at play, and the majority of writers who discussed the painting when it was first displayed characterized it as an image of children participating in or having just finished a game. Gallati has suggested that the placement of the two oldest girls, at the edge of a darkened and ambiguous entryway, is symbolic of their maturation into an unknown future. Several art historians have interpreted the painting as revealing Sargent's psychosexual thoughts. In the succeeding years, none of the girls would marry, and the two oldest suffered emotional disturbances in maturity.