Edward Darley Boit (1840-1915)

A landscape painter best known for his watercolors, Edward Darley Boit was born in Boston and attended Boston Latin and Harvard College (class of 1863). He was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1866 and he married Mary Louisa Cushing; together they had four daughters. 

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In 1871, after viewing an exhibition of Corot landscapes at the Soule and Ward Gallery in Boston, Boit gave up his conventional life, sold his Newport home and moved to Europe with his family. He studied painting with Frederick Crowninshield in Rome, and then with Thomas Couture and François-Louis Français in Paris. He was a friend of John Singer Sargent, who immortalized Boit’s four daughters in the painting The Daughters of Edward D. Boit now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. For the next eighteen years the Boits divided their time between Boston and Paris. After the death of his wife, Boit moved to Brookline, Massachusetts and married Florence Little. After several winters the family returned to Europe, spending time in Paris and Rome and summers at Cernitoio, an estate outside of Florence, Italy.