Two Museum Visits
By: James Mustich
Tags: Culture, John Singer Sargent, Painting, Art, Museums

Two Museum Visits

On a missing Rembrandt and the genius of John Singer Sargent.

1. Paintings Lost and Found in Boston

We drove to Boston last April to look at two paintings. One of them — Rembrandt’s The Artist in His Studio — was missing, and no one at the Museum of Fine Arts could tell us exactly where it was. The display case meant to house the work was empty except for the two hooks on which it usually hung and a printed caption describing everything about the absent panel except the reason why it wasn’t there.



One thing I could tell from the dimensions of the case, however, was that the painted panel was much smaller than I had anticipated it being. My expectation of a larger composition had been set by the imaginative capacity Simon Schama endows it with at the outset of his mammoth book, Rembrandt’s Eyes, in which he reflects upon this self-portrait before an easel as a key to his subject’s art. Schama writes: “So this is not a picture of a painter catching himself in the act. It is, in fact, quite free of the narcissism of his armored dandy self-portraits. This time, Rembrandt is not lost in self-admiration; he is lost in thought. And the image he delivers is not one he has seen in a glass, but in his mind’s eye. Insofar as one could ever be made, this is a picture of in-sight.”



On that Saturday morning in the MFA, however, the “in-sight” was all in the eye of the beholder, as The Artist in His Studio had no presence at all, except the one I carried with me inside my own head. Inquiry as to its whereabouts got us nowhere, although everyone we consulted offered assurances that it had not gone far: it had been “there yesterday,” was “always on display,” would surely “be back soon.” But, alas, not today, not now.



So off we went in search of the other destination painting we pursued, John Singer Sargent’s very large canvas The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Sargent’s group portrait of his friend and fellow painter Boit’s four daughters — ages 8, 14, 12, and 4 (moving across the painting from left to right) — places them in a visual chamber of secrets that summons some of the compositional spirit of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (which, in its own way, is something of a grand opera version of the artistic self-consciousness exhibited, on an intimate scale, in Rembrandt’s The Artist in His Studio­).

I’ve always loved Sargent’s depiction of the Boit children, each of whom is given a separate presence, a kind of emergent psychology, within the shadowed space. No doubt a large part of my affection for it stems from an afternoon some two decades ago, when our younger daughter, Iris, at the time halfway in age between to the two youngest of Sargent’s subjects, had her impatience with hours of museum-going arrested, and her frustration consoled, by the sight of the four sisters nearly as large as life; without a word, she sat on the settee in front of the work and stared at it until we dragged her away some fifteen minutes later. She has no memory of this now, but I’ve never forgotten the way her anxious being was held rapt for a while on a long-ago afternoon.



In fact, the memory of my now adult daughter as a fidgeting child stopped in her tracks by unexpected art — my own in-sightful picture, you might say — was one of the reasons I wanted to revisit The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, so perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that what struck me when I stood in front of it again is the way Sargent conjures the fraught adventure of growing up so completely, as if he were creating not a portrait of the Boit daughters, but of childhood itself. And yet, posed amid shadows and empty space, the girls are given discrete identities; the eldest daughter is almost entirely withdrawn, retreating quietly into a larger if more uncertain existence. As the viewer’s eye moves from foreground to background, from the youngest child sitting in front to the figures of her three elder siblings, who retreat as their ages increase from clear light into encroaching shadows, from the here-and-now of childhood into the unknown evenings of their lives to come, it’s difficult not to dwell on the past — on childhood gone and children grown — and, as Richard Wilbur lovingly put it, “To recollect that, while it lived, the past / Was a rushed present, fretful and unsure.” There all of that was, captured in oils by John Singer Sargent, which more than made up for an elusive Rembrandt.