The Space Between Their Gazes: Meeting The Three Sisters

The first thing you notice is the light.

It pours in through a tall Gothic window, draped with a red curtain that softens it, slows it, and then sets it down gently on three women who share a room but not a mind. One speaks, animated and sure of her own point. Another reclines, her face turned toward the speaker, but her thoughts drifting far beyond her words. The third is somewhere else entirely, not in the room so much as in her own world, her eyes on the page before her, her hand resting on a globe as if the entire earth had paused to wait for her.

The painting is The Three Sisters, made in 1824 by Jean-Antoine Laurent. At first glance, it might seem like a quiet domestic tableau. But the quiet is deceptive, the stillness loaded with tension. Laurent wasn’t merely making a pretty scene; he was working in the Troubadour style, a French movement that pulled moments from the Middle Ages and Renaissance into intimate, anecdotal paintings. The style traded in historical nostalgia, small stories that carried large morals. And here, the story comes straight from a 17th-century literary source, a tale by Maria-Jean L’Héritier de Villandon set during the Crusades.

In that story, three sisters, Babillarde, Nonchalance, and Finette, are locked in a tower by their father, who is leaving for battle and wants to guard their virtue. Each is given a distaff with a fragile glass spindle, a cruel kind of promise: the spindle will shatter if her honor is lost. Prince Riche-Cautele, clever and calculating, tests them one by one. Babillarde, quick with words and eager for attention, falls first. Nonchalance, idle and detached, follows. Only Finette, her mind absorbed by study, fends him off and keeps her spindle whole.

Laurent catches them not in the moment of temptation, but in the slow aftermath. Babillarde sits on the left, dressed in white and green. A dark bird rests on her lap, calm but not caged. She gestures with her right hand, mid-sentence, her face turned toward the sister across the room. The lute beside her is silent, as if the music has stopped mid-song, an echo of pleasures that have already passed. She has already lost her spindle, though nothing in her posture admits regret.

Finette stands at the table in the center. Her skirt is deep green, her bodice the warm gold of ripened wheat. One hand steadies a terrestrial globe, the other hovers over an open book with a poised quill. She is caught in the act of thinking, not speaking. She doesn’t turn toward either sister; the conversation is a distant hum to her. In the logic of the fable, she is the one who kept her virtue, her hand on the world, her mind in the text, her will unshaken. The objects before her aren’t props. The globe is the expanse she chooses to explore on her own terms. The book is her defense, each line a stone in the wall she has built against intrusion.

On the right, Nonchalance reclines on a cushioned stool near the bed. She wears white silk under a red jacket. One arm props her head; in the other hand, she loosely holds a small blue ribbon or token, as if even her grip can’t be bothered to tighten. She faces Babillarde, but her eyes are far away. In the story, she, too, has been undone, and the ribbon might be a souvenir of the very encounter that broke her spindle.

The distance between them is telling. They share the same room, but Laurent gives each sister her own sphere. Babillarde’s is conversational and decorative, Finette’s is scholarly and illuminated, Nonchalance’s is private and detached. The light from the window favors Finette, making her golden bodice the visual anchor. You could take this as a moral nudge, the artist’s way of rewarding virtue with radiance.

Every object here works in layers. The bird in Babillarde’s lap is a voice that can be trained, coaxed, or silenced. The lute is beauty idled, music unsounded. The globe is worldly knowledge, a realm Finette claims. The quill is both weapon and tool, the means to write herself into safety. The ribbon in Nonchalance’s hand may be a token of surrender, a quiet acknowledgment that the contest is already over. Even the stained glass above them, with its robed blue figure (perhaps Mary), plays silent witness, an emblem of judgment looking down from its perch.

When Laurent painted this, the moral would have been obvious to viewers familiar with L’Héritier’s tale: two sisters fallen, one sister pure. It was a domestic stage set with the props of virtue and vice, a visual sermon disguised as an anecdote. But time changes the way we read things. Strip away the backstory, and it becomes something else entirely, a study in three kinds of attention: the woman who talks, the woman who listens without listening, and the woman who tunes out everything but her work.

And maybe that’s why it still works. The specifics of the fable belong to the Crusades; the temperaments belong to every century. We’ve all been in rooms like this, where one person drives the conversation, another nods along without engagement, and a third is off in a private orbit. We’ve all seen how the same light can fall differently depending on where you sit.

Laurent’s Troubadour scene was painted in an age hungry for romanticized history, but it also betrays a quiet realism. These aren’t abstract muses, they’re women mid-life, mid-choice, mid-consequence. The two with broken spindles don’t look ruined; the one with hers intact doesn’t look triumphant. They are just… continuing. And that is truer to life than any moral fable, because even after the verdict is in, the day goes on.

That’s the part that stays with me. The light moves across the floor, the bird shifts in its lap, the quill hovers over the page, the ribbon rests in a loose hand. No one is looking at you. You’re just another passerby in the long watch of their confinement. When you leave, they will still be there, two with their spindles broken, one untouched, sharing the same tower, under the same sun, each caught in her own unshakable orbit.

Image reference: Photograph of The Three Sisters (1824) by Jean-Antoine Laurent, taken by the author at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia.

Jean-Antoine Laurent, Self-Portrait in a Dark Cloth Coat, lithograph, circa 1817. Printed by Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie. Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, accession no. 1972.660. Source: Art Institute of Chicago.