The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit

In their lifetime, these four little girls saw more of the world than any other little girls could have possibly hoped. American princesses collecting shell tiaras from their Rhode Island vacation home, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit lived lives of uninhibited wealth and travel. The blue and white vases, standing tall in their portrait, traveled with the family -- packed and unpacked like familiar faces in crowded rooms of people speaking languages foreign to the girls' well cleaned ears.  

If you visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, you'll find John Singer Sargent's portrait of family and youth humbly hung, but powerfully flanked by the actual vases standing like old friends in Sargent's painting. Gallery whispers tell us that when the MFA acquired the vases, they tipped them about for a good cleaning, spilling out a few long-lost toys the younger girls had tossed into the vases' open mouths. 

It's a beautiful intersection of history and family and art -- leaving us to wonder where one begins and the other ends. And if at the end of it all, when hung on the quiet wall of a museum, the boundaries we've drawn between the intersections of our segmented lives mean anything at all.