John Singer Sargent

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargent, Oil on canvas 1882, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The painting depicts four young girls in the family's Paris apartment. The painting is now prominently displayed in the Boston  museum in-between the two tall blue-and-white Japanese vases depicted in the work. The vases, as well as the painting itself, were donated by the Boit family. 

The painting's unusual composition was noted at its earliest viewings, but the subject was taken simply as that of girls at play. Henry James, who should have known better, described the painting as representing a "happy play-world....of charming children." Only much later did viewers began to recognize the psychologically unnerving nature of the painting.

The girls (Florence, Jane, Mary Louisa and Julia) appear to be at successive phases of childhood, retreating as they grow older into alienation and loss of innocence. Notice the placement of the two older girls, at the edge of a darkened entryway, perhaps symbolic of maturation into a disturbing isolated future. All of the girls seem uncomfortably stiff and doll like, even the youngest. In retrospect, Sargent was prophetic; none of the girls were to marry, and the two oldest later suffered emotional problems.

 

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) by John Singer Sargent,1884 Metropolitan Museum of Art

source: http://www.penhook.org/JSS.htm