[7] Art historian Barbara Gallati notes that the English translation of Las Meninas, "Maids-in-Waiting", is an apt description for the activity of the Boit children.

[10] The relationship between the works is considered so significant that the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston) lent The Daughters to the Museo del Prado in 2010, so that the paintings could be exhibited together for the first time.

[11][12] The brushwork of several passages has been seen as deriving from Frans Hals, and nearly contemporaneous works that have been cited for their similarities are Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and, especially for its psychological complexity, The Bellelli Family by Edgar Degas.

[5] In very nearly hiding one of the girl's faces and subjugating the characterization of individuals to more formal compositional considerations, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is as much about the subject of childhood as it is an example of portraiture.

The pinafores were certainly appropriate garments for girls at play, and the majority of writers who discussed the painting when it was first displayed characterized it as an image of children participating in or having just finished a game.

[5] Author Bill Brown has commented on what he calls the "uncanny qualities" of the depiction of the girls and the vases, which he asserts promote "an indeterminate ontology [because of] the inability to distinguish between the animate and the inanimate."