Frederick A. Bosley (1881–1942)
Peggy and the Bittersweet, 1926

Oil on canvas
McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College, Gift of Elizabeth B. Brewster

At the end of the nineteenth century, a burgeoning global art market and a cultural fascination with Asia led upper-class New Englanders, like Larz Anderson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, to collect Asian—particularly Japanese—works of art made for export to adorn homes like that depicted here.

Bosley, trained in the late impressionist style at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1900 to 1906, studied primarily under Edmund Tarbell (1862–1938) and also under Philip Leslie Hale, one of whose paintings is displayed in the Hill Family Conference Room (Room 111). From 1913 to 1931, Bosley assumed his teacher’s former position as director of painting and drawing at the school. His studies of genteel women at leisure in their sitting rooms echo Tarbel’s interior scenes. Both artists depicted sitters often draped in Japanese kimonos within fashionable domestic interiors decorated with Japanese prints, and Asian porcelains and textiles to construct images of refined and cultured New England brahmins.

The same blue kimono with coiling dragons (a motif found also on the adjacent punch bowl), probably one of the artist’s studio props, appears on the wall in the McMullen painting and is worn by a figure in Bosley’s The Gold Screen (see image) and also drapes a table in Emily Reading to Peggy (see image). In the latter work, Emily wears the pink kimono donned by Peggy in the present painting.