JOHN SINGER SARGENT The expatriate American artist
John Singer Sargent(1856–1925), born in Florence, Italy, was a
younger contemporary of Eakins. Sargent developed a looser, more
dashing Realist portrait style, in contrast to Eakins’s carefully ren-
dered details. Sargent studied art in Paris before settling in London,
where he won renown both as a cultivated and cosmopolitan gentle-
man and as a facile and fashionable portrait painter. He learned his
adept brushing of paint in thin layers and his effortless achievement
of quick and lively illusion from his study of Velázquez, whose mas-
terpiece,Las Meninas (FIG. 24-30), may have influenced Sargent’s
portrait The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (FIG. 30-39). The
four girls (the children of one of Sargent’s close friends) appear in a
hall and small drawing room in their Paris home. The informal, ec-
centric arrangement of their slight figures suggests how much at ease
they are within this familiar space and with objects such as the mon-
umental Japanese vases, the red screen, and the fringed rug, whose
scale subtly emphasizes the children’s diminutive stature. Sargent
must have known the Boit daughters well and liked them. Relaxed
and trustful, they gave the artist an opportunity to record a grada-
tion of young innocence. He sensitively captured the naive, wonder-
ing openness of the little girl in the foreground, the grave artlessness
of the 10-year-old child, and the slightly self-conscious poise of the
adolescents. Sargent’s casual positioning of the figures and seem-
ingly random choice of the setting communicate a sense of spon-
taneity. The children seem to be attending momentarily to an adult
who has asked them to interrupt their activity. The painting embod-
ies the Realist belief that the artist’s business is to record modern
people in modern contexts.Realism 80730-39John Singer Sargent,The
Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,1882.
Oil on canvas, 7 3 –^38 7 35 – 8 .Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Mary Louisa
Boit, Florence D. Boit, Jane Hubbard
Boit, and Julia Overing Boit, in memory
of their father, Edward Darley Boit).
Sargent’s casual positioning of the Boit
sisters creates a sense of the momentary
and spontaneous, consistent with Realist
painters’ interest in recording modern
people in modern contexts.College in Philadelphia, where the painting hung until its sale in
- That Eakins chose to depict this event testifies to the public’s
increasing faith in scientific and medical progress. Dr. Gross, with
bloody fingers and scalpel, lectures about his surgery on a young
man’s leg. The patient suffered from osteomyelitis, a bone infection.
Watching the surgeon, acclaimed for his skill in this particular oper-
ation, are several colleagues, all of whom historians have identified,
and the patient’s mother, who covers her face. Indicative of the con-
temporaneity of this scene is the anesthetist in the background hold-
ing the cloth over the patient’s face. Anesthetics had been introduced
in 1846, and their development eliminated a major obstacle to ex-
tensive surgery. The painting is an unsparing description of an un-
folding event, with a good deal more reality than many viewers
could endure. “It is a picture,” one critic said, “that even strong men
find difficult to look at long, if they can look at it at all.”^12
Eakins believed that knowledge—and where relevant, scientific
knowledge—was a prerequisite to his art. As a scientist (in his anatom-
ical studies), Eakins preferred a slow, deliberate method of careful in-
vention based on his observations of the perspective, the anatomy, and
the details of his subject. This insistence on scientific fact corresponded
to the dominance of empiricism during the latter half of the 19th cen-
tury. Eakins’s concern for anatomical correctness led him to investigate
the human form and humans in motion, both with regular photo-
graphic apparatuses and with a special camera devised by the French
kinesiologist (a person who studies the physiology of body movement)
Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Eakins’s later collaboration with
Eadweard Muybridge (FIG. 30-54) in the photographic study of animal
and human action of all types anticipated the motion picture.
1 ft.