Edward Darley Boit

Edward Darley Boit (1840 - 1915), A widely traveled and wealthy artist known for his picturesque paintings, especially of Venice, Boit painted in a direct style and always showed, "interest in specificity of site, climate, and date, common among French and American Impressionist artists"

Edward Darley Boit was born in Boston and died in Rome, Italy in 1915. (Some sources list 1916 as the death date). He studied at Harvard Law School and then studied art in Paris with Thomas Couture. He lived in Newport, Rhode Island from 1864 to 1871 and then went to Europe where he became an expatriate painter, living in France and Italy. However, he visited the United States nearly every year of his remaining life.

While Edward Darley Boit loved living abroad, he maintained his connection to the United States with annual return trips. He and his wife, Maria Louisa Cushing Boit, were active and well-liked members of the American artistic community in Paris. In her autobiography A Backward Glance, Boit’s acquaintance Edith Wharton described him as, “the brilliant water-colour painter whose talent Sargent so much admired.” Boit died in Rome in 1915 at the age of seventy-five.

In Paris, he studied with Thomas Couture, and he exhibited at the Paris Salon in the 1870s and 1880s, and in 1914 at the Art Institute of Chicago. A close friend of John Singer Sargent, he and Sargent h

As for the Boit daughters, Florence (leaning against the pillar in the painting) was always a rather odd duck, never evincing the slightest interest in marrying or attending the usual social events. She was an avid player of the relatively new sport of golf—which she introduced to the Boston area, inspiring the local rich folks to build a course at a country club in Newport. She and a cousin, Jane Boit Patten, nicknamed “Pat” to distinguish her from the innumerable Jane’s and Jeanie’s in the family, became fast friends and in later years, lived in what was called a “Boston marriage”, two spinster ladies living together.
The second daughter, Jane (standing next to Florence, facing forward), both before Isa died and afterward, was ill a great deal, both physically and emotionally, and spent several periods of time in and out of “retreats” and institutions where she underwent various cures to allay her apparently rather violent fits of anger and depression. Not much is known about Mary Louisa (standing to the far left, hands behind her back) except that she and Julia (on the floor with her babydoll) were always together, and Julia became fairly well known for her paintings and illustrations in water colors. Florence died at age fifty-one, on December 8, 1919, in Paris.

With the outbreak of WWII in 1939, the three remaining sisters moved back to the United States. Julia and Mary Louisa (also known as “Isa” like her mother) lived in Newport, where Mary Louisa died on June 27, 1945, at age seventy-one. Jane (or “Jeanie” as she was known) died at the age of eighty-five on November 8, 1955, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Julia passed away in February 1969, at the age of ninety-one.

Works:
Poppi in the Casentino, Tuscany Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Rio di San Barnaba, Venice Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Venice: Afternoon on the Grand Canal Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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