Sargent's Daughters: Biography of a Painting

by Erica E. Hirshler, John Singer Sargent (Artist)

Overview

John Singer Sargent’s renowned portrait “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit” is examined in an aesthetic, philosophical, and personal tour de force that has been called “thoroughly absorbing” (New York Times Book Review); “brilliant and insightful”?(Wall Street Journal); “an attractive, well-illustrated scholarly book, further enlivened by the author’s warm and friendly tone” (Times Literary Supplement); “a uniquely crafted history” (The Magazine Antiques); “a brilliant work of criticism, without a word of jargon in it” (Maine Antique Digest); “sensitive and penetrating” (Choice); and “a meticulously researched account of [the Boits’] milieu, their eccentric lifestyle, its unintended effects on their daughters, and of the creation of the enchanting masterwork” (Cape Cod Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780878467761
Publisher:	Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Publication date:	11/23/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	262
File size:	610 KB

Editorial Reviews

Sargent makes you feel simultaneously drawn into and excluded from the sisters' world, a phenomenon that Erica E. Hirshler…explores in intriguing detail in her new book, Sargent's Daughters. "From this singular picture," she explains, "a novel unfolds." And her "biography" of this painting—written after she documented the Boit sisters' lives and researched every significant detail in the painting…is that thoroughly absorbing novel.
—The New York Times

Megan Marshall