The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
John Singer Sargent
Not as much a portrait of girls as a portrait of childhood, Sargent’s most psychologically compelling work moves between beautiful and unnerving with each view. The four sisters are placed in their Parisian front room, ordered by age, with the youngest at the front and the oldest retreating into the shadows, a dark passageway behind her. The girls are wooden in their poses, so much so that the work has been called a still life, while the scenery, particularly the large Japanese vases, seem alive and dynamic. The work is temporal, time unfolds away from us as the children grow up and are moved away from the clarity of innocence into the dark unknowing of adolescence.
Friday 28th August
Today we arrive at the Full Moon, and also a lunar eclipse, as the Earth moves between the Sun and Moon, casting its shadow across the Moon in the early hours and turning much of its surface a deep copper-red. This month we welcome the Sturgeon Moon, named after the large freshwater fish that were traditionally most readily caught at this time of year. The Full Moon in Aquarius brings us to a culmination in the synodic cycle of the Moon. Outside of our material lives, bound by the clock and the Gregorian calendar, for time immemorial the Moon would have been one of the ways in which we tracked time. Many ancient sites around the world have encoded the Moon’s cycles into the stones and pillars that still stand today.
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