Looking and Feeling: The psychological intensity of an unusual Parisian portrait

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons — public domain
In “Looking and Feeling,” columnist Weili Jin ’28 explores form, rhythm and emotional valence in works of art from across the globe.
In honor of John Singer Sargent’s birthday on Jan. 12, 1856, I thought it’d be fitting to celebrate the painter by writing about his “Portrait of Children” (1882), now titled “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.” It’s one of the most perplexing — and, I think, best — portraits of all time.
Four children and two vases share a room in a Parisian apartment in Sargent’s impressive square canvas. The children wear prim, apron-like white pinafores; the vases are beautiful Japanese porcelains. But something about the atmosphere feels off. The room feels paradoxically lifeless and silent, perhaps save for the imagined creaking of wooden tiling. The boisterous chaos typical of child’s play is absent here, replaced by an unnerving, deafening stillness.
The youngest Boit daughter, Julia, has charmingly plopped herself on the rug in the foreground. She doesn’t look entirely amused. Sitting for Sargent’s portraits was known to take quite a bit of time — he sometimes even demanded repeat sittings — and it’s hard to expect a four-year-old to do it without displeasure. Unsurprisingly, Julia engages us in a pleading gaze that seems to ask when she can return to playing with her doll. Her shoes are turned inward, perhaps having fidgeted with her feet out of boredom.
But the three other, older girls seem even less thrilled to be here. The girl on the left, eight-year-old Mary Louisa, stands frozen in a pose that reminds me of Degas’s little bronze dancer. She looks forward, but not at us. Her distracted eyes seem to wander out of boredom from having to hold her pose for the artist; she doesn’t appear very present in the space at all.
The two oldest girls in the background, at least to me, occupy a separate dimension altogether. Demarcated from the foreground by intense shadows, they emerge out of the darkness, eerie and ghostlike.
We see one of them, Jane, in profile, leaning listlessly on the vase behind her. The smooth highlights and dashes of blue on the vase are more eye-catching than her person — she almost competes with the vase for our attention.
Darker undercurrents surface, however, when we extrapolate this initially innocuous detail to suggest the competition for the attention of the Boit parents between the well-being of the children and the allure of material luxury.
The Boits were wealthy American expatriates in Paris, and taken together with the girls’ troubled emotional states in later life, I wonder whether materialistic pursuits might have preoccupied their parents at the expense of adequately caring for the children.
With this in mind, the tone of the two vases in Sargent’s picture changes. They take on a certain disconcerting, looming presence, towering above the girls and dominating the space with pomp and ostentation.
To Jane’s right, we see Florence, who at fourteen was the oldest daughter. I find her expression haunting. She stares absently in our direction, lips slightly open, skin pale, hands dangling at her sides, enclosed on all sides by shadow. Her aloof and wooden appearance reminds me of the twin girls from Stanley Kubrick’s horror film “The Shining.” Without knowing Florence’s biographical details, I might’ve assumed this to be a posthumous memorial portrait.
The natural question, then, is why Sargent opted to portray the Boit children in this quietly unsettling and certainly unorthodox way. Each time I think about this, I go back and forth on whether I’m reading too deeply into the picture. But Sargent is a virtuoso portraitist with an exceptional sensitivity to his subjects’ psychology and character. (For this reason, he’s my favorite 19th-century artist.) Even if the girls were exhausted and uninterested after long hours of sitting for the portrait, Sargent could’ve easily enlivened their expressions in the painting. Their odd, unsettling appearances, then, must be a conscious choice.
One interpretation that I find plausible is the materialism hypothesis I mentioned — that the luxurious Japanese vases standing alongside the girls, competing for their spotlight, suggest a certain degree of emotional neglect from the Boit parents. Indeed, both Mom and Dad are notably missing in the portrait. Perhaps they were largely missing from the girls’ lives, too.
Another explanation centers around the relative placement of the four figures. Notice how Sargent has situated the youngest child closest to us and the oldest child farthest from us. In other words, each child’s distance from us increases with age — and, as intimated by the shadows in the background, the extent to which we find them accessible, “knowable,” concomitantly decreases with age.
I find it interesting to imagine the Boit parents in the position of the viewer. They’d see Florence, the oldest daughter, recede into distant darkness, out of their reach. Sargent’s painting then becomes a commentary on adolescence and leaving it behind.
And it’s precisely this unknowability, I think, that makes the work so compelling. Like the figures within it, the meaning of Sargent’s portrait stays ever ambiguous, ever so slightly out of reach. It’s a work that demands repeated, slow looking over many occasions, inviting us again and again to consider, theorize and reconsider its puzzle of deceptive simplicity.
You can find “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” in the upcoming exhibition “Sargent and Paris,” on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (April 27—August 3, 2025) and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (September 23, 2025—January 11, 2026).
Weili Jin ’28 is an Arts & Life columnist from San Diego studying economics and art history. His favorite art museum is the National Gallery, London. [Contact: weilij 'at' stanford.edu]