"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest (via alerioon)
(Source: larmoyante, via alerioon)
![art-history:
John Singer Sargent Daughters of Edward Darley Boit 1882 Oil on canvas 87.375 x 87.625 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Reflecting how selfhood is shaped by social circumstance, [John Singer Sargent’s] Daughters of Edward Darley Boit sensitively portrays the development of femininity from childhood to adolescence. In his portrait of the four daughters of an American artist living in Paris, Sargent tells his tale by moving from the clear light and gracefully awkward pose of the small girl in the center, wearing a white pinafore and clutching her doll, to the dawning reticence of the girl on the left, who still engages us directly. Furthest from the viewer, the two oldest girls hover on the edge of a shadowed room defined by two enormous Chinese vases, symbols of their future as maternal “vessels,” increasingly withdrawing into a world in which their selfhood will be defined by their gender and limited by their status as exquisite possessions—like the vases whose shapes they resemble—of a husband. Sargent presents the passage into womanhood as a gradual tightening of boundaries. From foreground to background, and from childlike receptivity to growing reserve, the painting charts the age-old theme of innocence and experience, in which the originally unencumbered self encounters increasingly restricted possibilities. And here, the growing conviction that individuals cannot control their own destinies becomes even more pronounced when those individuals are female.
—Angela L. Miller, et al., American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2008)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m13u4kjSJl1qzzsg4o1_500.jpg)
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest (via alerioon)
(Source: larmoyante, via alerioon)
