first time. The brushwork of several passages has been seen as deriving from Frans Hals, and nearly contemporaneous works that have been cited for their similarities are Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and, especially for its psychological complexity, The Bellelli Family by Edgar Degas. Dressed in white pinafores, the children are arranged so that the youngest, four-year-old Julia, sits on the floor, eight-year-old Mary Louisa stands at left, and the two oldest, Jane, aged twelve, and Florence, fourteen, stand in the background, partially obscured by shadow. In very nearly hiding one of the girl's faces and subjugating the characterization of individuals to more formal compositional considerations, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is as much about the subject of childhood as it is an example of portraiture. Interpretation When the painting was first exhibited in Paris in 1882 and 1883, critics were struck by the oddness of the composition and "wooden forms" of the figures. In 1887, Henry James described the painting as representing a "happy play-world ... of charming children;" his uncomplicated reading went largely unchallenged for nearly a century. Much modern criticism has interpreted unsettling qualities in the painting, seen as both beautifully painted and psychologically unnerving, in which the girls appear to be seen at successive phases of childhood, retreating into alienation and a loss of innocence as they grow older. The sense of autonomy among the girls and the vitality of Sargent's paint has often made viewers feel as if by looking at the portrait, they have interrupted the children, who glance up in response. While today's audiences have sometimes assumed that the girls are engaged in some sort of clandestine activity, in Sargent's day the most frequent notion was that they had simply been playing. The pinafores were certainly appropriate garments for girls at play, and the majority of writers who discussed the painting when it was first displayed characterized it as an image of children participating in or having just finished a game. Gallati has suggested that the placement of the two oldest girls, at the edge of a darkened and ambiguous entryway, is symbolic of their maturation into an unknown future. Several art historians have interpreted the painting as revealing Sargent's psychosexual thoughts. In the succeeding years, none of the girls would marry, and the two oldest suffered emotional disturbances in maturity. In 1919, the four sisters gave the