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\author{Greg Hudson}
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The scene in the painting on my left is warm, compassionate, and safe.
The women in this painting appear virtuous and hospitable, and I can
see no reproach in the way they look back at me.  It is the painting
on the right, though, that draws me, not through invitation but
through mystery.  The girls on my right are coldly watchful, and I
suppose I ought to feel driven off by their indifferent stares, but
instead I want to know why they stare like they do.  I wonder how they
live in their austere, spacious domain, and what their hidden thoughts
are.

Both of the paintings are by John Singer Sargent.  The painting on the
left, {\it Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter Rachel}, set in a narrow
rectangular frame, shows Rachel with her chin on her mother's
shoulder, and her right arm around her mother's left arm.  The two
women take up most of the space in the painting; the rest of the
painting's space depicts a cozy corner of a room filled with
ornamented furniture and statues of religious figures.  The painting
on the right, {\it The Daughters of Edward D. Boit}, is set in a large
square frame and shows four unnamed girls spaced around a large, open
living room and parlor.  The girls are drawn small in this painting;
in fact, they are the smallest features in the living room.  The
square frame emphasizes the lateral distance between the girls and the
relative size of the rug and walls of in the living room.

In both of the paintings, the positions of people mirror those of
objects in the painting.  In the left painting, Mrs. Warren and her
daughter are in the same pose as the statue of the Madonna in the
upper left, presumably a deliberate gesture to emphasize their
religion and virtue.  In the right painting, the four daughters mirror
the four urns in the living room: the front two daughters are spaced
far apart, like the two urns near the front of the painting, while the
back two daughters form an identical pair next to each other, like the
two small urns in the far background of the painting.  The front
rightmost urn is shielded by a red blind; similarly, the youngest
daughter is shielded, in a way, by her doll.  The implicit comparison
between the daughters and the urns suggests to me that the daughters
play a primarily ornamental role in their family---perhaps even not as
the most important ornaments, given the physical dominance of the
large urns in the painting.  There is more to suggest that the
daughters are treated as ornaments: all of the girls wear white
pinafores over black stockings, and the two in back wear identical
blue dresses under their pinafores, again reminiscent of the pair of
vases in the background.  All of them have hair cut to just below
their shoulders, contributing to a uniformity which suggests that the
daughters are not used to being treated as individuals.  By contrast,
the women in the painting on the left wear different dresses and have
different hairstyles.

But if the clothing and haircuts of the four daughters of Edward D.
Bois work to destroy their individuality, their poses and their
expressions belie this conformity.  The daughters have separated
themselves from each other, and display different behavior.  The girl
on the left folds her arms behind her back and looks politely at the
viewer; the younger girl in front looks expressionless, but holds her
doll protectively.  One of the girls is too indifferent to face the
viewer; the other three gaze watchfully out of the painting.  It is
the daughters' isolation and their individuality in the face of an
enforced conformity that gives this painting a sense of mystery for
me, and makes me wonder what they are thinking as they look at me.

By any measure, the painting on the left is the more cheerful of the
two.  Sargent chose light colors, primarily white and pink, to paint
the two women in this painting, and very little of the room is in
shadow.  The white brush strokes showing the play of light on the
womens' dresses gives the two central figures a flattering radiance.
The painting on the right uses dark colors for most of the features of
the rooms it shows.  The entire back room, including two of the girls,
is shrouded in shadows; even the depiction of the white pinafores
shows not plays of light on fabric but patterns of shadows.  The front
room of the right painting is decorated with a simple rug and the two
giant urns, in contrast to the detailed statues in the left painting;
straight lines and sharp angles replace in the right painting the soft
curves of the left painting.  But the austerity and dark colors in the
painting on my right do not make it depressing so much as they make it
intriguing.  I try harder to make out the vague shapes in the back of
the painting, because each shape is a hidden clue about the mysterious
lives of the four daughters.

I cannot find a flaw in the painting of Mrs. Warren and her daughter.
There is no hardness in their expressions, no sense of discomfort in
their home.  But it is the four unnamed daughters whose image I
remember, in their austere house with its giant urns.  I am not
offended by their diffident gazes, or turned off by the austere
emptiness of their territory.  I am curious.

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