Drawings & Photography

Since my first encounter with the painting, the Boit heirs have donated those six-foot-tall blue-and-white vases to the museum, thus preserving the “silent sentinels” that, Hirshler writes, in crossing back and forth across the Atlantic became the girls’ “constant symbol of home.” The vases, which now flank the painting, weren’t empty when they arrived. Rather, “their miscellaneous contents” became “a document of mischief and the passage of time.” Stuffed in with the packing materials were “a cigar stub, a paper airplane, a pink ribbon, a tennis ball, sheets of geography lessons, a letter about the repeal of Prohibition, an Arrow shirt collar, an old doughnut, an admission card to a dance at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Mass., three badminton shuttlecocks, many coins and a feather.”