Slideshow: Whistler

Photogravure attributed to Mortimer Menpes (1859-1938). Signed with the butterfly and inscribed by Whistler, probably in 1899, "To Charles L. Freer—à un de ces jours!" Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art / Arthur M. Sackler Archives]

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1860-1861
Oil on canvas
H x W: 96.3 x 71.7 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1917.234a-b

Whistler began work on this painting in 1860, shortly after he moved from Paris to London. It depicts the music room at the home of Whistler's half-sister, Deborah Haden, whose reflection appears in the mirror on the left side of the composition. Deborah's daughter Annie is absorbed in a book, while Isabella Boot, a family friend, appears in a boldly painted black riding habit, an up-to-the-minute costume that presents a marked contrast to Deborah's conventional gray gown.

At first glance this painting appears to be a straight-forward genre scene. Yet the painting is actually more complicated. The women, while literally close together, are disengaged from one another. A number of formal peculiarities underscore the atmosphere of psychological distance: the perspectival grid formed by architectural and decorative elements in the room refuses to line up properly; the tilting floor and the strange angle of image in the mirror further disrupt the illusion of three-dimensional space. The visual coherence of the painting is due not to its narrative content or spatial structure, but instead comes from the bold colors and patterned chintz draperies, whose repetition across the surface creates a sense of decorative unity.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1863-1865
Oil on canvas
H x W: 199.9 x 116.1 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.91a-b

This painting, which hangs in the Peacock Room, was part of a series of costume pictures undertaken by Whistler in mid-1860s in which western models appear in Asian dress, surrounded by Chinese and Japanese objects from Whistler's own collections of porcelain, lacquer, fans, and painted screens. Whistler's creative borrowing of Asian objects and influences was a way to suggest the temporal and spatial distance of a purely imaginary realm. Here, the noted Victorian beauty, Christina Spartalli, strikes a pose that recalls both the elongated figures depicted on Chinese Kangxi porcelain and the graceful courtesans that appear in ukiyo-e prints.

The Princesse was purchased by the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland, who hung it in his dining room, where he also displayed his extensive collection of Kangxi porcelain. Whistler suggested some changes to the color scheme of the room which would, he told Leyland, better harmonize with the palette of the Princesse. The result was Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, which Whistler completed in 1877.

Later, in 1903, Charles Lang Freer purchased the Princesse and, the following year, acquired the entire Peacock Room, where Whistler's Princesse has presided over a changing array of Asian ceramics ever since.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1864
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 50.1 x 68.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.75a

In this costume picture from the mid-1860s, Whistler's model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, poses as a courtesan—or connoisseur—absorbed in the study of a Japanese print by Hiroshige. Japanese prints were still relatively unknown in London, and a bewildered British art critic described it in 1865 as "a picture, drawing, fan or whatever it may be."

It was precisely this apparent strangeness that attracted Whistler to Japanese art. By borrowing its motifs and stylistic elements, he liberated his art from the narrative and moralistic demands of typical Victorian painting. The frame was designed by Whistler to extend the decorative, japonesque surface of the painting. It is decorated with roundels of palm and ivy leaves reminiscent of Japanese family crests.

When Charles Freer, who already had amassed fine collection of Japanese screens, first saw this painting in 1902, he thought it "one of the most perfect things in composition and colouring in the whole range of Mr. Whistler’s art."

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, ca. 1868
Oil on millboard mounted on wood panel
H x W: 46.4 x 61.6 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.138a-b

The White Symphony: The Three Girls is one of the so-called Six Projects, a never-completed decorative sequence dedicated to the theme of beauty. The precise narrative depicted is unclear, and Whistler's choice of a musical title suggests that he hoped to direct viewers to focus on the formal interplay of colors rather than on a particular story. The vivid palette and freely painted surfaces of the Projects charmed the poet Algernon Swinburne, who saw them in Whistler's studio in 1868 and said, "They all give the direct delight of natural things; they seem to have grown as a flower grows, not in any forcing house of ingenious and elaborate cunning."

This painting, like all the Six Projects, was actually the result of highly deliberate experimentation, undertaken when Whistler was exploring a range of sources and seeking a distinctive artistic style. By borrowing freely from Japanese prints, classical Greek sculpture, Rococo painting, and the neoclassicism of his own time, Whistler hoped to liberate his art from the chains of narrative realism and Victorian morality.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1864-1870; additions 1870-1879
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 61.4 x 48.8 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1892.23a-b

A pivotal work in Whistler's oeuvre, The Balcony stands between the fanciful costume pictures such as Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Gold Screen (F1904.75) and the more fully synthesized approach to Japanese art evident in the Nocturnes of the 1870s (F1909.127, F1902.97). Here, the bright, flatly painted foreground and oriental props suggest a world far from modern-day London. But the kimono-clad models—and the viewer—can also look across the river to the factories of Battersea.

Whistler's purpose was not to criticize or even to document the industrial landscape, but rather to transform it: the smokestacks are veiled in atmospheric mist, and the adjacent slag heap (a well-known monument of industrial waste) evokes images of Mount Fuji by the Japanese artist Hokusai.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1860
Oil on canvas
H x W: 74.6 x 55.3 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1901.107a-b

This painting, originally entitled The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, On the Thames, records a particular moment during a bitterly cold winter, when the Thames was frozen for more than fourteen weeks. Although he likely retouched the work later in the decade, Whistler claimed to have completed it in three days of work at an inn overlooking the river. The bold brushstrokes, somber palette, and thinly painted surface reinforce the realistic immediacy of the image.

This prosaic portrait of a working river seems to be worlds away from the nearly abstract visual poetry of Whistler's later Nocturnes (F1909.127, F1902.97), but there is a hint of his later style in the misty grey atmosphere that envelopes the factories on the opposite bank.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1871-72
Oil on canvas
H x W: 62.7 x 40.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.249a-b

After Whistler moved from Paris to London in 1859, he found the Thames to be a constant source of inspiration. He spent many hours on the river, gathering impressions that were later recorded on canvas his second-story studio in Chelsea, which itself afforded a view of the river and its distinctly modern, industrial environs.

In 1872, when Whistler painted Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea, his view included the construction of the Chelsea Embankment, a major public works project designed to reclaim land around the Thames and that included the construction of massive walls and landing stages along the river bank. Here, the artist has incorporated construction fences and even the new saplings that were part of the urban planning project. Even so, Whistler has overlaid the scene with deliberate artifice, using the flattened forms, bird's-eye perspective, and asymmetrical compositional principles of Japanese prints to create a decorative, rather than a realistic, image. By placing his signature butterfly on the frame (which Whistler designed specifically for this painting) as well as on the canvas itself, he calls attention to the framed, artful nature of the image.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1866/ ca.1874
Oil on canvas
H x W: 76.4 x 50.7 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1909.127a-b

Whistler began this painting in 1866 on a trip to Chile, where he watched the Spanish navy attack the harbor at Valparaiso. This is one of a series of works done during the trip, an episode of Whistler's biography that remains somewhat mysterious. This painting was originally conceived as a daylight scene, and its asymmetrical composition and flattened forms show the influence of Japanese prints. Whistler returned to the painting in the 1870s, and it was probably then that he transformed it into a Nocturne and gave it the present title. Whistler had called his earliest images of urban darkness "Moonlights." But when his patron, Frederic Richards Leyland, suggested the musical term "Nocturnes," Whistler was delighted: "I can't thank you too much for the name "Nocturne," he wrote. "You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me—besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish!"

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1870-1875
Oil on canvas
H x W: 49.9 x 72.3 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.97a-b

From the time he moved to London in 1859, Whistler always lived within sight of the Thames River, finding it a constant source of inspiration for his art. It was a luminous twilight view of the River in the summer of 1871 that led Whistler to produce thirty-two paintings known as "Nocturnes." These ephemeral images of urban darkness would become his most original contribution to nineteenth-century painting.

This work depicts the view toward Battersea that Whistler would have seen from his second-story studio in Chelsea. Battersea was an industrial area of London, full of factories, slag heaps, and smog, and Whistler's interest in the urban scene hints at his ties to the French Realist movement earlier in his career. By the 1870s, however, Whistler had embraced and synthesized a new artistic influence and formal vocabulary: the compositional principles and flattened forms of Japanese prints. Here, he combined these elements—evident in the gracefully asymmetrical arrangement of masts, planar bands of color, and nearly monochromatic palette—with the evocative quality of moonlight to impart a poetic, mysterious beauty to the industrial river view. Victorian viewers, accustomed to clearly rendered visual narratives, found the Nocturnes perplexing. But Charles Lang Freer appreciated what he described as their "refinement and mystery." He eagerly sought out eight examples and regarded this painting, which he purchased in 1902, as "one of the four greatest masterpieces of the Nocturnes."

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James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1870-1873
Oil on canvas
H x W: 218.5 x 119.4 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1905.100a-b

Charles Freer, who purchased the Peacock Room in 1904, did not see this painting of the Room's first owner, Frederick Leyland, until 1905, though he confessed that hearing a fellow-collector describe it "makes my blood tingle." It depicts Whistler's important early patron in black evening dress, accented with the ruffled shirt-front for which Leyland was renowned. The dramatic palette and tall, narrow format are derived from the Spanish court painter Velásquez, whose works Whistler had seen some years earlier, at an exhibition in Manchester. Although artist and patron would suffer a falling out over Whistler's decoration of the Peacock Room, Whistler was on intimate terms with the Leyland family in the early 1870s, and Frederick Leyland, who endured long sessions posing for this work, was pleased to be painted in the style of seventeenth-century royalty.

Many of Whistler's full length portraits are contemporaneous with the Nocturnes, with which they share many formal qualities, including a reduced, darkened palette and soft, almost vaporous surfaces. As with the Nocturnes, Whistler gave these portraits musical titles intended to emphasize color and composition rather than the individuality of the sitter. Even so, the personalities depicted are rarely effaced by their artistic handling, and it was surely the dynamic tension between artistic selection and human presence that attracted Freer to this work.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1858
Etching on paper
H x W: 12.7 x 8.9 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1898.223

This print, published in Paris in 1858 as part of "Twelve Etching from Nature" (the "French Set"), is a portrait of a poor working woman whom Whistler had encountered selling flowers outside of a Paris dance-hall in 1858. The nearly-blind and mentally unstable Mère Gerard made a strong impression on Whistler, who made another etching of her in a stooping posture, as well painting two portraits in oil. Here, Whistler depicts his subject in careful detail, using a densely layered network of hatching and cross hatching to create a convincing sense of texture, tonality, and volume. With her vacant gaze and unfriendly expression, Mère Gerard appears to the viewer as Whistler must have seen her, devoid of sentiment or idealization. In the late 1850s, Whistler had become associated with the radical French realist Gustave Courbet, and his influence is evident here and throughout the French Set, which included other images of working women, as well as unidealized urban landscapes and portraits of the artist's own family.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1879-80
Etching and drypoint on paper
H x W: 29 x 20.2 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.45

The Doorway is part of the First Venice Set, a group of twelve etchings by Whistler commissioned by the Fine Art Society, a London art gallery, in 1879. The palace depicted here dates to the early sixteenth century, but by the time Whistler saw it, it had become a furniture repair shop: chairs dangle from the ceiling, their legs visible above the open doorway, echoing the grillwork on the façade and creating a delicate tension between patterned surface and illusionistic depth.

While in Venice, Whistler produced nearly forty etchings, and a Second Venice set, comprising twenty-six images, became the first works by the artist purchased by Charles Lang Freer, who acquired the entire portfolio from a New York art dealer in 1887. Freer would go on to amass a near-perfect collection of Whistler's entire graphic oeuvre, including multiple states of individual images and many rare impressions.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1894-1903
Oil on canvas
H x W: 74.7 x 50.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.89

Whistler described this female nude as "a figure to, in a way, hint at 'Spring.'" It held a special significance for both the artist and for Charles Lang Freer, who had commissioned—and paid for—the work in 1894 but did not take possession of it until the artist's death in 1903. When Whistler's wife Beatrix lay dying of cancer in 1896, the expatriate wrote to his patron in Detroit that he had continued to work on the painting, in part to ease his grief. "I write to you many letters on your canvas," he explained to Freer, and indeed, the multiple layers of paint around the model's face convey Whistler's almost obsessive reworking of the surface.

Whistler designed and painted the frame to harmonize with both the figure and the checkerboard pattern of the rug on which she stands. Whistler thought the frame was an important element in the overall design of a work of art. Here, he signed it with his trademark butterfly, ensuring that the frame and image would be understood as two parts of a whole.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1902-1903
Oil on wood panel
H x W: 51.8 x 31.7 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.301a-b

Charles Lang Freer allowed his name to be engraved over the doorway of the museum that he founded, but his likeness appears in only one work in the collection, this unfinished portrait by Whistler. It was begun in 1902, while Freer was in London shopping for art. Freer claimed to have no interest in having his portrait done—he confided to a friend that he hoped Whistler would not "waste valuable time upon a valueless theme"—but the painter insisted, and Freer sat for him in a brown jacket that Whistler had especially requested him to wear. Shortly after the sittings began, the two men traveled together to Holland to see an exhibition of works by Rembrandt, whose palette may have influenced the rich tonalities of this portrait. While in The Hague with Freer, Whistler's became seriously ill, and his health continued to decline through the next year. He nevertheless continued to work on this painting. "He is making me look like a pope," Freer told his business partner in Detroit. "There will of course, be little of Freer in it." Not unpleased, Freer explained, "It will surely be all Whistler!!"