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The daughters of Edward Darley Boit by John Singer Sargent is arguably the most famous and most beautiful American painting in the collection in Boston.
So there is a sense of loss when it comes here to Madrid but there is also a sense of doing something incredibly positive
in the sense of international exchange to see the Sargent painting by the side of Velazquez that inspired it.
It is an enormous pleasure for me and I find it personally quite moving. There is one thing, I wish so much that John Singer Sargent himself could see his great painting
which he thought might bring him immortality hanging here in the Prado next door to one of the great masterpieces of all time Velazquez's Las meninas.
I think for me that one of the interesting things about Sargent's painting is the way it's suspended between the old masters and modern life.
He learns so much from Velazquez and from his time in Spain and then he allows it to percolate in his head and he comes back to Paris and he makes something entirely different out of it.
He pays great homage to Velazquez's composition and also to Velazquez's manner of enveloping his figures and air and atmosphere.
And he also replicates the interesting disconnection between the figures as much as the connections between them.
During the second half of the 19th century the Prado’s holdings of Velázquez had a major influence on foreign artists visiting Madrid.
Of all the works that influenced these painters it is undoubtedly Las Meninas that was the most appreciated.
Sargent, who visited Spain on at least eight occasions between 1879 and 1912, copied Las Meninas
and was inspired by its composition, its use of light and its atmosphere for one of his own masterpieces, in fact his greatest painting:
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, which he painted three years after his visit to the Prado.
He's painting a modern French interior with four very ordinary little girls who are wearing their everyday clothes they're not dress up like infantas,
they're not even wearing their best outfits instead they are dressed as if they were playing or in the schoolroom
and Sargent captures them in this very mysterious difficult to figure out environment of the foyer of their apartment in Paris.
You also have a similar sense in this picture of the suspension of time.
As if the figures are caught at just an instant and in a few moments they will move on.
And that I think is also something that is very similar to Las meninas where one gets a sense that we have a frozen moment
and that would have been particularly appealing to artists like Sargent who were so interested in portraying everyday life during their own time.
We can now see Sargent’s great work alongside Las Meninas in this very gallery that has previously seen
the work of Manet displayed alongside that of Velázquez as well as a juxtaposition of Picasso and Velázquez, given that Picasso also copied Velázquez in the Prado.
Sargent is an intermediary painter between Manet and Picasso, but he also offers a very good illustration
of how Velázquez was used by painters working prior to the innovations of the early 20th-century avant-garde.
In this sense, both his preference for the genre of portraiture and for another, almost more important genre,
i.e. the interior with figures, which became so fashionable at this time, reveals that the lesson of Velázquez was a useful one.
This was not only with regard to his evolution towards naturalism but also to the creation of a mysterious ambiguity and that sense of a more introspective pictorial quest
of which Sargent was an outstanding example and which he particularly explores in this painting, for which Las Meninas was such a useful reference.