Mrs. Edward Darley Boit (Mary Louisa Cushing)

Mary Louisa Boit, known as Isa, was the mother of the four girls in Sargent's large Paris picture of 1882. She and her husband Edward, a painter and an old friend of the artist, had long lived in Europe on her family's fortune from the Boston China trade, and when Sargent made his first working visit to the United States, in 1887, the Boits put him up in Boston. Here she sits on a gilded French sofa with her hands loosely laced, a pink feather pinned in her hair, smiling straight out at us. The black bodice is sober enough. The skirt is pink satin covered with black spots the size of coins. Polka dots were in fashion, though mostly on children's clothes, and when the museum recently showed the picture in an exhibition on Sargent and dress, its labels recorded that her outfit had been criticised as showy and saucy. The portrait stayed with the family. In 1963 it was given to the museum by Julia Boit, the youngest of the four daughters, who as a small child had sat on the floor at the front of that 1882 painting.