Читать книгу Sargent's Daughters - Erica E. Hirshler - Страница 7

Ned and Isa Boit

HAD SARGENT NOT painted his four daughters, Edward Darley Boit, always known as Ned, might be remembered only as one of a large number of late-nineteenth-century American painters who traveled to Paris, exhibited with some regularity at the Salon, and earned high acclaim from members of their own social circle. He was never able to advance his painting career into the first rank, owing either to casualties of circumstance or perhaps a lack of sufficient professional ambition or ingenuity. Yet he was a talented artist, particularly as a watercolorist, and he was dedicated to his craft. Sensitive to the accusations that his career was only the hobby of a wealthy man, Boit said painting was an “arduous profession,” one that was inappropriate as a “refuge of those who prefer to do nothing.”¹³ Despite his limited place in the annals of art, his reputation is secure, inextricably linked to his friendship with Sargent and to Sargent’s portrait of his daughters, four of Boit’s eight children.

Boit was born in Boston in 1840. He was named after his father, also Edward Darley Boit, a Harvard-educated lawyer and the son of John Boit, a naval officer and explorer who sailed up the Pacific coast in 1792 and gave his ship’s name, the Columbia, to the great river in Oregon. Ned’s father had married Jane Parkinson Hubbard in 1839; the Hubbards were an old New England family with sugar plantations in Demerara (British Guyana) and long-standing affiliations with Harvard University. Edward and Jane Boit had three sons - Edward (Ned), Robert (Bob), and John - and two daughters, Jane and Elizabeth (known as Lizzie); another daughter, Julia, died in infancy. Ned Boit’s early life echoed his father’s: he studied at Boston Latin School, graduated from Harvard in 1863, and went on to Harvard Law. According to some of his friends, Ned was well suited for a career in the law and would have excelled in the profession, but the field did not hold his interest for long, and soon he would be spending more time looking at (and thinking about) art than reviewing legal briefs. Quite athletic during his college years, Ned was a refined and courtly man, cultivated and kind, a reader of books and a consummate host. His brother Bob described him as “a large, strong man, nearly six feet tall” and recalled his elegant deportment and dress, his distinguished bearing, and his democratic taste. Olivia Cushing Andersen, a relative by marriage, found him “a very attractive man, good-looking, well dressed, a thorough gentleman, a man of the world, and a good painter.”¹⁴

Despite the current title of Sargent’s painting, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit were not their father’s children alone. Their mother, Mary Louisa Cushing Boit, was a lively, vivacious woman who enjoyed people and society. Known all her life as Isa, she was born in 1845 to John Perkins Cushing of Watertown, Massachusetts, and his wife Mary Louisa Gardiner. Like many upper-class Bostonians, Isa Boit was related by blood or marriage to almost everyone in town. Her great-uncle was Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Boston’s wealthiest merchant and an early patron of the arts; her maternal grandfather was John Sylvester Gardiner, the rector of Trinity Church; her uncle was Henry Higginson, the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She was characterized by her friend Henry James as “brilliantly friendly” and “eternally juvenile.”¹⁵

Isa Boit may have inherited some of her energy and verve from her father, who had been a seaman, a trader, a smuggler, and a philanthropist. Cushing, whose mother had died when he was ten, had been raised by his uncle, Thomas Handasyd Perkins. At age sixteen, he sailed for China on one of his uncle’s ships and soon became the sole agent for Perkins’s lucrative China trade. Cushing stayed in China for almost twenty-five years, becoming a skillful manager and a full partner in the business. By 1827, at age forty, he was ready to retire and return to the United States, but it took several years for him to arrange for the disposition of the firm, which by then traded not only in fabric and tea but also opium. Eventually Cushing consolidated Perkins and Company with the business of another Bostonian, Samuel Russell, and left Canton to settle in Boston in 1831. A very wealthy and most eligible bachelor, he soon married Mary Louisa Gardiner. After the birth of their first child, a son, they moved from the city to their country estate in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts. Called Bellmont, the house was designed in 1840 by New England architect Asher Benjamin (with Cushing’s concentrated involvement), sparing no expense and including such innovations as double brick walls for superior insulation, indoor plumbing, and bathrooms heated by hot air ducts. There, according to all accounts, Cushing lived the life of an eastern potentate replete with Chinese servants, spending his days cultivating a lavish garden and extensive greenhouses, supporting civic causes, and encouraging the redistricting of Watertown to establish a new town to be named Belmont.¹⁶

The Cushings had five children - four sons (one of whom, William, died young of scarlet fever) and one daughter, Mary Louisa, born in 1845 and named for her mother. Isa was the baby of the family, seven years younger than her youngest surviving brother. It is easy to think that she might have had an opulent upbringing, and her niece Olivia Cushing Andersen later recounted that the children grew up at Bellmont “with every desire satisfied.” Bostonians fondly remembered “the wonderful children’s parties given by Mr. Cushing, to which the boys and girls of Boston looked forward with joy, - of the haystacks; of the ponies for the children to ride; of the music; of the fire-balloons; of the dancing on the lawn, with the well-known dancing-teacher Papanti in charge; and of the procession of the children to the supper table.”¹⁷

When Isa was just three years old, her parents commissioned an image of her in marble from one of the most popular recorders of Boston society, sculptor Henry Dexter. Dexter was best known for his portrait busts and was particularly sought after for his images of children, some of which were full length. He made six pieces for the Cushings: busts of Mrs. Cushing and her three eldest sons, and “portrait-statues” of her youngest children, William and Isa. Isa’s was originally entitled The First Lesson, and it shows a small bare-foot girl with tousled curls, serious and unselfconscious, seated on a floor cushion reading a book. The informality of her pose and her apparent self-possession reappeared many years later, when Sargent painted Isa’s own youngest child, Julia, sitting on the floor with her doll.

Isa Cushing and Ned Boit married on June 16, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln had just been nominated for a second term as president with a platform that called for the abolition of slavery. The Battle of Petersburg was underway; Union general Ulysses S. Grant would be forced into retreat the following day. The warships USS Kearsarge and CSS Alabama were lined up off the coast of France before engaging, three days later, in a battle that was painted by Edouard Manet. Isa was nineteen; she had already lost both her parents and was under the guardianship of her brothers. Ned was respectable and promising; he had avoided the army and was currently studying law. Their wedding was a grand occasion: they were married in an Episcopal ceremony at Christ Church in Harvard Square, attended by eight groomsmen and eight brides-maids, and an elaborate reception was held at Bellmont. “It was a wonderful day,” Ned’s brother, Bob Boit, fondly reminisced. “We had a grand time with dancing all the afternoon in the long drawing-rooms ... the gardens near the house were in their June beauty, and at that time no gardens near Boston equaled them. Over the centre of the garden was a large marquee covering the fountain. Here refreshments were served.” Bob added that the charming Isa, “the very loveliest of brides,” became “one of the best friends I ever had.”¹⁸

Together, Ned and Isa Boit lived a deliberately peripatetic life. They began their marriage by dividing their time between Boston and Newport, Rhode Island, where both of them had many connections through family and friends. They built a summer home in Newport, “The Rocks,” which sat above Bailey’s Beach on property adjacent to that of the bride’s brother, Robert Cushing. Children came quickly, and not only daughters. Their first child, a son, was born in April 1865; he was named Edward after his father and was always known as Neddie. But even with the excitement of the baby, the prospect of keeping to a routine of winters in Boston and summers in Newport or Cotuit, on Cape Cod, apparently seemed dreary. The Civil War had ended and traveling was now much less hazardous. In 1866, just after Ned was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar and while Isa was pregnant for the second time, the Boits sailed for Europe, appropriately enough on a vessel named the China.

Their itinerary was structured around Ned’s interest in art, an avocation that his wife’s comfortable inheritance would soon allow him to pursue. The first stop on their ambitious itinerary was Dublin, where Ned inspected William Frith’s detailed study of the varied crowds in the train shed at Paddington, The Railway Station (1862, Royal Holloway and Bedford New College); Boit proclaimed it to be “by far the best painting I [have] ever seen.” They traveled on to London, where they stayed with Ned’s aunt Julia and her husband Russell Sturgis, another Boston merchant related to the Cushings who had once been deeply involved in the China Trade, but who was now an important partner at the banking firm Baring Brothers in London. There, Ned visited the annual exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, the show of British Water Color Painters, various art galleries and museums, and the panoply of exhibitions on display at the Crystal Palace, the great iron and glass hall devoted to shows about science, exploration, art, and industry. He found the setting, Joseph Paxton’s industrial masterpiece, to be “an immense building of dingy glass, like a huge conservatory - but lacking ... the smell of flowers ... [it] is like the inside of a circus tent - redolent of animals, food, and above all of a crowd.”¹⁹ Mechanics fairs and technology were things Americans could see at home, and clearly Boit was unimpressed; he had come to Europe to see less familiar sights, especially paintings.

Boit was not an uncultured man, but simply an American who had had little opportunity at home to study the visual arts. It was a common problem, for there were few places to see great art in the United States before the Civil War. Boston’s art scene in the 1850s and 1860s was haphazard. The Museum of Fine Arts did not yet exist, and the collections at the Boston Athenæum, a combination library and art gallery, then consisted largely of ambitious portraits and historical scenes by American painters; only the two grand Roman interiors by Giovanni Paolo Panini and a large still life by the seventeenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Boel stood out as European masterworks from the numerous copies of famous compositions by Guido Reni and others.²⁰ Boston’s private collections, to which Boit had easy access, held some treasures, but most featured contemporary pieces, principally canvases by Gustave Courbet, Jean-François Millet, and other artists of the Barbizon School whose paintings were most favored by Boston’s taste-makers. To appreciate the old masters, Boit needed to travel abroad.

Ned was attempting to instruct his eye, which he knew lacked the sophistication that studying Europe’s masterpieces could provide. Like many Americans on tour, the Boits also went shopping, purchasing several paintings for the home they were making in Newport. The works they selected were, if unadventurous in spirit, typical for the period - a Cairo sunset by Charles-Theodore Frère, two small paintings by Richard Ansdell (best known for his depictions of dogs), a rural landscape with cattle by William Shayer, a large landscape by Henry Bright. When Ned Boit visited the National Gallery in London in June, he remarked that he “was not yet educated up to Turner,” adding that while he found the British landscapist J.M.W. Turner’s earlier works beautiful, he felt that they all exhibited “a studied neglect of drawing - as if color were the only thing in which excellence was to be aimed at.” He stated that he would “reserve [his] humble opinion” of the old masters “until I am able - by an inspection of many of their pictures - to really understand the peculiarities and peculiar merits of each,” since, he admitted, he “was disappointed in the gallery - it was neither so large nor so choice as I had supposed - one room was devoted to paintings on gold in the Fra Angelico style - not one of which I - in my present uncultured state - would hang on my walls.”²¹

From England in July 1866, the Boits traveled to Boulogne, Paris, and Dijon before heading through Switzerland and Germany. In the fall, they returned to England, where Isa bore their second son, John, in October. Isa did not make a quick recovery and the baby was sickly, but they continued their travels. By mid-December they were back in Paris, where Ned visited the Louvre and the exhibition rooms at Goupil’s, the leading art dealer in the city. His appreciation of the French capital developed on this second visit, and he wrote that the more he “saw of Paris the more convinced I am that my first impressions of it were erroneous. Its grandeur grows on me daily.”²² Despite Ned’s attraction to the city, he was determined to keep traveling toward the destination that had long been celebrated as the culmination of the grand tour: Italy.

The Boits passed through Genoa and Florence to Rome, where they spent the spring of 1867. A sizeable American community existed there in the 1860s, anchored in the picturesque Palazzo Barberini apartments of the famous American Neoclassical sculptor William Wetmore Story and his wife, Emelyn. The Storys, like the Boits, were well-connected Bostonians, with many friends and relatives in common (among them, Ned and Isa’s recent hosts in London, the Sturgises). Ned and Isa joined their compatriots in rounds of social events and for sightseeing excursions to ancient monuments in the city and on the Campagna, where the classical ruins made a haunting and picturesque vista. Despite the illnesses of both Isa and their baby son John, who died in March 1867 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Ned made sure to complete the artistic education he had planned. He visited the Vatican to see the famous works of Raphael and Michelangelo and traveled to Naples, Pompeii, and Venice; he especially enjoyed the paintings of Domenichino in Rome and Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin at the Church of the Frari in Venice. But Isa’s health remained fragile, and soon the Boits, with their young son Neddie, were on their way home to Boston and Newport. Ned resumed his legal career, opening an office in Pemberton Square, the headquarters of many of Boston’s most prestigious law firms.

In 1868, Ned Boit’s artistic epiphany came when he visited an exhibition of landscapes that included paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot at Boston’s Soule and Ward Gallery. The naturalism of Corot’s imagery and his ability to capture light, air, and atmosphere astonished Boit, and he resolved to follow his heart and become an artist. Brother Bob later confessed that Ned seemed at “rather an advanced age to begin [a new career] - but for the first time in his life he has found something which is really absorbing to him + the only occupation he has ever devoted himself to with zeal + industry.”²³ Like so many aspiring American painters of the age, Ned planned to study art abroad. Isa Boit enthusiastically supported (both emotionally and financially) the idea of living in Europe, which she much preferred to Boston or Newport, and thus Ned was able to leave the law behind him.

By the time they began organizing their move, the family had grown again to three children. Florence was born in Newport on May 6, 1868, and Jane had arrived on January 17, 1870, also in Newport. But these joys were tempered, for Ned and Isa were now faced with the heartbreaking task of splitting up their family and leaving their firstborn son, Neddie, behind. It must have been a challenging period for all of them, despite the advice they received from the best physicians. Neddie clearly was not normal. “At the age of two he could talk,” recalled Bob Boit. “Then he suddenly stopped, lost his intelligence, and became an idiot - and when [he was] 5 or 6 years old [he] had to be sent from home for the sake of the other children.” The Boits found a place for him in Barre, Massachusetts, at a private boarding school for “feeble-minded” children established in 1851. The institution was run by Dr. George Brown according to the theories of the day; students were separated by sex and ability, as well as by income level, and teachers sought to improve their state through physical education and manual training.²⁴ Whatever schooling was provided for Neddie seems to have had little effect, and he never regained his ability to communicate. His illness preoccupied the family for years to come.

In the fall of 1871, without their son, the Boit family left for Europe. Ned was drawn first to Italy and then to the French countryside and ultimately to Paris, increasingly intrigued by the liberation from detail and emphasis on overall effect that he saw in the paintings of the French school. Among the friends the Boits made at this time were Henry James and painter Frederic Crowninshield, two men with Boston connections who would be in and out of their society for the rest of their lives, as they intersected with one another in a variety of cities on the international circuit. Some sources indicate that James met the Boits in Rome, others in Boston, but they were certainly acquainted by the spring of 1873, when James mentioned them in a letter from Rome to his mother. The Boits and Crowninshields participated actively in Rome’s whirl of expatriate social occasions and intrigue. In 1871, they attended a great Renaissance costume ball given by lawyer and diplomat Maitland Armstrong, who later remembered that “among the most beautiful American women [to attend] were Mrs. Frederick Crowninshield and Mrs. Edward Boyt [sic] of Boston,” adding that “all the artists were there.” During this same period, James chronicled exhilarating riding parties on the Roman Campagna, noting in confidence that he thought it best to “fight shy of Mrs. Boit who ... is an equestrian terror.”²⁵

In the same 1873 letter, James referred to Boit and Crowninshield as “a couple of young artists.” Boit had taken a studio on the via Margutta, at the center of the American art community in Rome. Some scholars have suggested that he may have studied with William Stanley Haseltine, an American landscapist and fellow Harvard man who was much praised for his crystalline depictions of Italy’s rocky coast. Soon thereafter, both Boit and Haseltine appeared in the correspondence of another American expatriate painter, Elihu Vedder. Vedder had apparently made a remark that had been taken amiss, as he wrote to a friend of Haseltine’s in 1876, “I gather you reported my saying - I thought amateurs like Haseltine and Boit had no business to open studios here in Rome. As to Haseltine it is utterly impossible that I should have called him an amateur when I have known him for years as a professional artist.” But Vedder did not elevate Boit from his amateur status, a condition that would haunt Ned throughout his career. His comfortable economic circumstances and his high social position kept some individuals from fairly assessing his artistic accomplishments. Vedder continued to complain about Boit, noting that while he “had always praised [Boit’s work] as far as it goes as very good,” he was insulted by what he had heard about Boit’s decision not to “mix with the artists in Rome.” Vedder angrily proclaimed, “It makes me mad to see people who have grown up without a thought of art until the idea suddenly strikes them of taking it up, [who] after a few lessons from some French master ... set up a studio and are classed among regular artists and turn up their noses at men who fought out the battle for themselves.”²⁶ Vedder would later relent, and he enjoyed Boit’s watercolors when he saw them on display in Boston in 1887. His initial quarrel with Ned may have been rooted in insult or jealousy, but it also seems likely that Vedder and Boit were on opposite sides of an artistic divide that opened during this period, when Rome had started to lose its luster and the art capital shifted north to Paris.

Boit had already begun to transfer his artistic allegiance to France, and the family spent more and more time there. At least by 1876, Ned had taken a studio at 139, boulevard Montparnasse, on the Left Bank in the heart of the city’s artistic quarter. Sometime in the early 1870s, he had indeed become the pupil of “some French master,” the French landscapist François-Louis Français, himself a student of Corot, the artist from whom Boit had received his initial inspiration. Français shared Boit’s love for Corot’s atmospheric approach and also for Italy; it is possible that the two men first met there, when Français traveled to Italy in 1873. Boit acquired one of Français’s dense forest scenes, painted near Plombières, Français’s birthplace, as well as a highly finished ink drawing of trees in Brittany, both of which he would donate to the Museum of Fine Arts upon his return to Boston in 1879.

Boit’s apprenticeship with Français drew to a close in 1876, when his painting La Plage de Villers (Calvados) was accepted by the jury for display at the Salon in Paris. The canvas has disappeared, but Ned’s brother described it as a landscape of “Rocks, beach + ocean,” implying that the scene was straightforward, with no heroic narrative or dramatic subject. Other early examples of Boit’s work, along with his interest in the Barbizon School, suggest that the painting employed the subdued palette and balanced composition favored by other popular landscapists at the 1876 Salon, Français among them.²⁷ Boit’s subject, the beach at Villers, a village on the Normandy coast just west of Trouville, had been popular with French painters in the 1850s and 1860s when the town was first being developed as a seaside resort. Coastal scenes were quickly becoming a favored motif for a variety of French artists, from the academicians to the Impressionists. Ned certainly knew this, but his own family’s maritime history and his upbringing in coastal New England would have given him a natural affinity for the subject.

Ned’s painting must have been based on sketches he made in Villers the preceding summer, which he then would have worked up into a finished composition in his Paris studio. Like most artists (but enjoying the extra comforts money made available to him), Boit usually spent his summers with his family in the country, often near the sea. In 1876, after celebrating Ned’s artistic success, the Boits traveled to Etretat, another popular coastal resort in Normandy. There, they kept company with Henry James, who talked about the scene in a letter to his brother William. “The quality of the air is delicious,” he wrote, but “the company is rather low, and I have no one save Edward Boit and his wife (of Boston and Rome) who have taken a most charming old country house for the summer.”²⁸ Ned used the family travels as an opportunity to paint, and their itinerary can be traced in pictures, although he may not have exhibited his work in chronological order. For example, in 1877, Boit showed a watercolor of the Piazza del Popolo at the Salon, but whether it documents a recent trip to Rome or was painted some years earlier is not clear. In that year’s Salon catalogue, he listed only his Paris studio as his address, dropping Rome from his record. None of Boit’s work appeared in the 1878 Salon, although whether or not he submitted anything to the jury is unknown. The family spent at least part of the next summer at Dinard, in Brittany, another favorite seaside resort. Boit exhibited an oil painting of the banks of the Rance estuary between Dinard and St. Malo (along with watercolors of Mont St. Michel and of St. Peter’s in Rome) at the Salon in 1879 (locations unknown). Soon after that show ended, flush with success, Ned and his family embarked for Boston. The trip was their first return to the United States in eight years.²⁹

Ned and Isa now had two more daughters to bring home, along with Florence and Jane. Mary Louisa, nicknamed Isa like her mother, was born in Paris on June 5, 1874, and Julia, the youngest, on November 15, 1878, in Soisy, a community north of Paris near Enghiens-le-Bain, a spa town boasting mineral baths and a casino. The Boits were planning an extended trip home, at least in part to introduce baby Julia, whom her grandparents and uncle had never seen, to the family. “Mama & pater,” wrote Bob Boit in 1879, referring to his parents, had hastened from Boston to Newport to prepare their house for “the coming of Ned + Isa, four children, nurses, maids, + governesses - who were expected early in June - + were coming directly to Mama’s to pass the summer ... As they had been abroad for eight years Mama & pater were specially anxious to have them pleased on their return with all their surroundings - in hopes, I think, of keeping them on this side of the water.” The family was close-knit, and it was hard for them to be separated. Ned’s parents had spent a year in Europe in 1874-75, arriving there just before Mary Louisa’s birth. Bob was immensely sad that his brother had never met his own beloved wife, Georgia Mercer Boit, who died of a fever in 1878, four years after their marriage. He eagerly anticipated his brother’s visit. Ned arrived in New York with his family on the SS Bothnia in mid-June 1879, and soon Bob announced that he had “seen Ned + Isa + their children. The two former have changed very little in the last eight years - with the exception that Ned is a little grayer + Isa is a little stouter + not quite so young looking ... I looked over Ned’s water color sketches - many of them lovely - which I had not seen before. [I] heard Isa’s Florie play her violin to Isa’s accompaniment + altogether enjoyed being with the family again.”³⁰ Florie was now eleven years old; her youngest sister, Julia, was an infant of seven months. The girls would have spent most of their time that summer in the care of the European nurses and governesses who had accompanied the family on their journey, providing them not only with assistance and education but also with continuity and a personal connection to their more familiar Parisian world.

The summer passed with a merry round of activities, but despite Ned’s parents’ hopes that he would stay in the United States through the winter, he returned to Europe with his family in early October 1879. The American experiment had failed, as brother Bob related:

Just [at] this time Ned + Isa who had been passing quite a gay summer at Newport staying with all their family at Pater’s, decided to gather up their belongings + return to Europe + to Paris at once - taking passage on the 8th Oct. This quite upset me. I had looked forward so much to Ned’s companionship this winter ... making me feel very blue. However Ned explained all his reasons - pecuniary + otherwise - to me, and on the whole I thought he could not do better, or that to say the least it was natural he should have done as he did.³¹

Wanderlust was certainly among the reasons the Boits refused to stay in America, along with the luxurious apartments and entertainments that they enjoyed more easily and affordably in France than in the United States. But the appeal of the French capital was more than economic; the lure of Paris’s cultural scene, especially for an artist like Boit, was simply too strong. Ned felt that Paris was the only appropriate place for him to earn his credentials as a painter. He arranged for a group of his watercolors to be sold at auction at the Boston gallery Williams and Everett after his departure. The catalogue discussed the works as “original studies from nature,” and the titles summarized the Boits’ travels throughout the preceding period, from Brittany to Mont St. Michel to the outskirts of Paris, from Florence to Rome to Sorrento. The progression from place to place became a lifelong pattern, but Paris became the Boits’ real home.