John Singer Sargent: Success

"The Daughters of Edward D. Boit" by J.S. Sargent

"At the age of twenty-six John Singer Sargent, an American, was being hailed in Paris as the author of the two outstanding pictures of the Salon. If it be true that art knows no nationality, the same might have been said of criticism, for here was a foreign artist, little more than of age, measuring himself beside the established favourites of Paris, beside Duran and Bonnat, Bougereau and Dagnan Bouveret, Bastien Lepage, Besnard, Boldini and the Impressionists, and being acclaimed as the most successful painter of the year.

He was soon receiving as many commissions as he could execute, charging for a full length eight thousand francs, for a half length five thousand, and for his subject pictures and landscapes anything from two to four thousand.

In 1883 Sargent exhibited at the Salon his picture of the Boit children, daughters of Sargent's friend, the American painter Edward Darley Boit, and his first wife, under the title of 'Portraits d'Enfants,' and was criticized for 'its four corners and a void' and the abbreviated execution. But the most captious acknowledged the beauty of the figures of the children, shown under a strong light upon a background of deep shadow relieved by a faint indication of light through a small window, rather reminiscent of Velasquez' 'Las Meninas.' What strikes the observer, in spite of the rather scattered composition, is the unity of the general impression, and this arrests his attention before his eye begins to take in the detail. 

The apparent ease of the grouping belies a complex and deliberate structure; the arrangement of the sitters, the rectangular patterning of floor, wall and carpet and the blocks of light and shade are part of an intricate geometric construction. There are no known surviving preliminary studies for the composition.

The oriental vases in the picture, made by the potter Hirabayashi or his workshop, of Arita, Japan, shared the family' migratory existence, making sixteen transatlantic crossings and suffering repeated damage.  They are still in the possession of a member of the family."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "John Sargent" by Evan Charteris and "John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits" by Richard Ormond and Elain Kilmurray.)