Sargent's Daughters. Erica E. Hirshler

       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