Florence, Jane, Mary, and Julia Boit and their parents were real. There was a doll in the family called Popau or P-paul. The Boits were Bostonian aristocrats who shifted back and forth across the Atlantic at least nineteen times while the girls were growing up. Each time, they took the huge Japanese vases with them.
Not much more than that can be definitely said about the Boits. People guarded their privacy much more closely in those days. A family history says of Iza Boit only that “. . . her eccentricities only made her more charming to those who knew her. ...”
But it seems clear that there was something about Florence and Jane, at least, that was not right. Whether this was mental or emotional disturbance, the girls grew up into women who were apparently unstable. Mary and Julia remained friends as adults, and Julia became a painter like her father. None of the girls married; but after Iza Boit died, Edward Boit married again and had a second family. Those children did marry and have children of their own.
What Iza Boit was actually like is not knowable at this point; but when, in 1919, the four daughters donated their portrait to The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, they did so in the name of their father only.
In 1884 John Singer Sargent painted the portrait of Amelie Gautreau, another American living in Paris. Madame Gautreau was a famous beauty of the period who was known for the pallor of her skin. Sargent painted her with her aristocratic profile turned away from the viewer, showing a degree of indifference that, together with the strap of her black dress falling off her shoulder, caused a scandal. In part the scandal was a moralistic one. Madame Gautreau, or Madame X, as the painting has come to be known, was a sort of creature who had not been seen before in art—a woman of loose morals who was not desperate to please her lover. Beyond this, it has been said, the painting outraged the Paris art world because Sargent and his model had taken everything the French had taught them about elegance and transcended it.
It may be hard to understand such a scandal today, but it was a scandal; and Sargent left Paris to work in England, where his work gradually became less and less daring. After the deaths of their parents, Emily joined him there, and they lived together for the rest of their lives.
Madame X has become an icon of our culture, known to millions of people who have never heard of John Singer Sargent. She seems to have a life of her own.
Like the Boit girls, John Singer Sargent never married. I have tried to make him as close to the living man as I could, but he kept his deepest heart secret.