WHISTLER IN LIVERPOOL WITH PEACOCKS

Another Whistler exhibition is now open, at the Blue Coat gallery, during the Liverpool Biennale. Whistler spent a significant amount of time in Liverpool during the period 1870-1875, when his chief patron was the Liverpool ship-owner Frederick R. Leyland. He was commissioned to paint portraits of the family and spent weeks, which turned into months, in the luxurious surroundings of the Leylands’ home, Speke Hall, which is hardly surprising : its a wonderful half-timbered house, now managed by the National Trust.

Speke Hall: The Avenue, etching and drypoint, 1870-1878, (G.101 9/14)

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (Acc. no: WAG 9066)

Image credit: photography@liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

Speke Hall, photograph credit: M.F. MacDonald, Whistler Etchings Project, University of Glasgow

 Whistler’s portraits were painted partly at Speke, partly in London, and only the portraits of Leyland himself and his wife Frances could be said to be completed. The splendid Symphony in Fleshcolour and pink: Portrait of Mrs Leyland is now in the Frick Collection, New York, and Arrangement in Black, the portrait of Leyland, in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Thus, since neither gallery can lend, they can never be re-united.

However, the Blue Coat has brought together some of the etchings and drypoints that Whistler made at Speke Hall- including the beautiful drypoint of Frances Leyland, The Velvet Dress, and these set the scene for a focus show on Whistler as artist, designer, and promoter of his vision of art.

The Velvet Dress (Mrs Leyland), drypoint, 1873/4 (G.120 5/7)

Hunterian Art Gallery (GLAHA 46774)

Photo © The Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow 2014

A spectacular recreation of the Fighting Peacocks panel from the Peacock Room, as painted for F.R.Leyland’s London house, was painted by set designer Olivia du Manceau (with occasional input from enthusiastic Blue Coat staff) and it is a delightful surprise to come on this up a flight of stairs in the galleries. The original was moved to the Freer Gallery of Art a century ago, but for a few months we can enjoy this vivid and painterly response to it (complete with blue and white Chinese porcelain on the shelves)  in Liverpool.

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876-77 (above, and detail, below). Reproduction by Olivia du Monceau, 2014. Installation view from Liverpool Biennial 2014. Photographs by Roger Sinek.

Central to the Blue Coat show are photographs, drawings and caricatures of Whistler, and the sharp, witty, serious, perceptive words of the artist himself. Whistler brings art to life: a picture of both the artist and his life and art emerges from the works and words as you go through the show. Here are his exuberant comments to the American sculptor Thomas Waldo Storey on 5 February 1883, describing the exhibition of his Venice etchings at the Fine Art Society:

‘Well great Shebang on Saturday 17. Feb – Opening of Show and Private View – “Arrangement in White & Yellow”. … in Bond Street – where I have won my battle and am on good terms with the Fine Art Society … All the World there – Lady Archie – the Prince – … great glorification – and the Butterfly rampant and all over the place! I can’t tell you how perfect – though you would instinctively know that there isn’t a detail forgotten – Sparkling and dainty – … and all so sharp – White walls – of different whites – with yellow painted mouldings – not gilded! – Yellow velvet curtains – pale yellow matting – Yellow sofas and little chairs – lovely little table yellow – own design – with yellow pot and Tiger lilly! Forty odd superb etchings round the white walls in their exquisite white frames – with their little butterflies – large White butterfly on yellow curtain – and Yellow butterfly on white wall – and finally servant in yellow livery (!) handing Catalogue in brown paper cover same size as Ruskin pamphlet!!! And such a catalogue! – The last inspiration! – … I take my dear Waldo, all this I have collected of the silly drivel of the wise fools who write, and I pepper & salt it about the Catalogue under the different etchings I exhibit! – …I give ’em Hell! …The whole thing is a joy – and indeed a masterpiece of Mischief!’

 The Blue Coat show focuses on Whistler’s designs for exhibitions, and includes rare sketches, watercolours, and etchings that were shown in Whistler’s distinctive artist-designed exhibitions.  For instance, he designed a velarium to hang over the exhibition rooms of the Royal Society of British Artists, during his brief and stormy interlude as President of the society. His proposal for a Patent application is on view, as is the Blue Coat’s evocative recreation of the velarium, a muslin cloth hung as a canopy from the ceiling and effectively diffusing the light and focussing attention on the works of art, and not the spectators.

James McNeill Whistler: exhibition view at the Bluecoat for Liverpool Biennial 2014.

Photograph by Mark McNulty.

As you see in this photograph, the spectators found plenty to enjoy, challenge and discuss in this exhibition. Go and see what you think!

 NOTES:

James McNeill Whistler, The Blue Coat, School Lane, Liverpool, curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Rosie Cooper. Liverpool Biennial, until 26 October 2014

Whistler’s letter to Waldo Storey is listed in:

The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp. On-line edition, University of Glasgow.

http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence

WHISTLER’S HAT

IN THE YEAR 1860, during the reign of Queen Victoria, the expatriate American, James McNeill Whistler, sat down by the London docks to sketch a crowd on a ferry boat. The result, a small etching called Penny Passengers, Limehouse is one of Whistler’s rarest works. It is currently on view in the exhibition An American in London: Whistler and the Thames at the Freer Gallery of Art. The frequent ferry boats from Limehouse would take passengers, for a penny, upriver or across the river Thames. The price was low: twelve pennies made one shilling, and twenty shillings, one pound sterling (£). A penny would buy, for instance, a loaf or two of bread. The wages for these passengers and sailors could well have been between 20 and 25 shillings a week, although many earned much less.

THE ART CRITIC Frederick Wedmore said that they were ‘standing in a large ferry-boat, or little steam packet, that is to cross the River’ but since the boat itself is not visible, the people could be standing on a pier awaiting the ferry. It is a vivid sketch, unfinished (at least there is a lot of space left empty) and it is likely that it was the quick record of a scene that changed completely within minutes as the ferry set off across the broad river.  

 

Penny Passengers, etching and drypoint (G.71)

Image credit © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution

(Acc. No. 1898.299)

 

ONLY FIVE impressions of Penny Passengers, Limehouse are known though Whistler may have planned more. It is little known and has rarely been exhibited. Thus it is a treat to see it at the Freer/Sackler in the context of Whistler’s studies of the river. and the men and women who worked by or on the river, or crossed it daily on their way to work. The river was a vital highway, the lifeblood of what was then the busiest port in the world. This etching shows barges, a side wheel paddle steamer, small sailing boat and masses of larger sailing boats moored in midstream.

THE FIGURES are as varied as the boats. There are women in summer bonnets trimmed with ribbons and lace, one carrying a parasol, and men in the extremely tall top hats of the period. Two men wearing caps may be sailors. Finally one man has a low-crowned, wide-brimmed straw hat, of the sort Whistler wears in his self-portrait, Whistler with a hat of 1859 – drawn a year before the Penny Passengers.

 

 

Whistler with a hat, drypoint (G.44)

Image credit © Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution

 (Acc. No. 1898.289)  

HOWEVER, in one photograph Whistler is seen in the sort of headgear associated with London clerks and businessmen: a bowler hat. A photograph, taken about this time, shows him with curly locks barely suppressed under a slightly rakish bowler.  It’s a great photo and not surprisingly, Dan Sutherland chose it for the cover of his excellent new biography of Whistler, A Life for Arts Sake (Yale University Press, 2014). The controversial Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (Detroit Institute of Art) acts as a fantastic backdrop to the artist, who looks as if he has just spent a long night in the pleasure gardens, watching the same rockets.

 

 

 

AND a final note: When the Whistler show opened at the Freer Gallery in May, there was a preview one evening featuring Victorian dress (a lot of crinolines and bonnets) and moustaches and bowler hats were given out to the visitors. Rejecting the moustaches, my colleague Patricia de Montfort and I sported dapper bowlers. Our companion, Howard Kaplan, entered thoroughly into the spirit of the evening, while researching a Whistler blog for the Freer : see his Mother’s Day blog at http://bento.si.edu/from-the-collections/american-art-from-the-collections/mother-knows-best/

 

 

REFERENCE
Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, online website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

http://www.victorianlondon.org/finance/money.htm

THE LIFE, DEATH AND LIFE OF A ROOM

 

J.McN. Whistler: The Peacock Room, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC

The Liverpool shipping magnate Frederick R. Leyland gave Whistler permission to modify certain details in the dining room at 49  Princes’ Gate, his London home.  What emerged was a complete reworking of the room as Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. Whistler held a Press View on 9 February 1877 (without Leyland’s permission), and distributed a pamphlet describing the decorative scheme:

The Peacock is taken as a means of carrying out this arrangement.

A pattern, invented from the Eye of the Peacock, is seen in the ceiling spreading from the lamps. Between them is a pattern devised from the breast-feathers.

These two patterns are repeated throughout the room.

In the cove, the Eye will be seen running along beneath the small breast-work or throat-feathers.

On the lowest shelf the Eye is again seen, and on the shelf above – these patterns are combined: the Eye, the Breast-feathers, and the Throat.

Beginning again from the blue floor, on the dado is the breast-work, BLUE ON GOLD, while above, on the Blue wall, the pattern is reversed, GOLD ON BLUE.

Above the breast-work on the dado the Eye is again found, also reversed, that is GOLD ON BLUE, as hitherto BLUE ON GOLD.

The arrangement is completed by the Blue Peacocks on the Gold shutters, and finally the Gold Peacocks on the Blue wall. 

By the summer, artist and patron had quarrelled and Whistler was banned from the house. After Leyland’s death, in 1892, 49 Prince’s Gate failed to sell. Whistler and his wife were concerned about the fate of the room. They wrote to art dealers –  E.G. Kennedy in New York, and Alexander Reid, in Glasgow – urging them to buy it.  ‘Dont you know anyone in Glasgow who would make an offer for the Peacock Room?’ she wrote to Reid on 1 May 1892, ‘It could with care be moved.’ 

J.S. Sargent urged Isabella Stewart Gardner to buy the room for Boston Public Library. Stanford White commented: ‘The house is now in the hands of the Philistines, and is being gutted and torn down preparatory to furbishing up in the latest modern style.’ The room was bought by Mrs Watney of the brewing family, and then in 1903 by Obach’s,London dealers; it was dismantled and shipped to the great Whistler collector, Charles Lang Freer. For years it was enshrined in his house in Ferry Avenue, Detroit.  At Freer’s death in 1919 it was removed to the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Recent expert conservation removed layers of over-painting to reveal the original fine brushwork, and today it stands triumphal, a vivid blue and gold box within the elegant halls of the Freer Gallery of Art: a happy, almost a miraculous  ending.

Such rooms are vulnerable, as recent events here in Glasgow show. As I write this, firemen, staff, librarians and conservators are assessing the damage to the most beautiful room in Britain: the Library designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh for Glasgow School of Art, and built between 1907-1909.

 

 

Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Library, Glasgow School of Art

 

Scottish Fire and rescue: GSA Library after the fire.

I watched the School burning on Friday 23 May, a terrifying and heart-breaking sight. Yes, everyone got out safely and due to the courage and determination of Glasgow firemen most of the building, the museum and archives are safe. But the Library is gone with its precious artwork, books and journals: I pray that it will have a future life, fully recreated, at the core of an active art school buzzing with students and art lovers, as secure and beautiful as the Peacock Room.  

GSA APPEAL: If any of my kind readers would like to offer assistance please visit
http://www.gsa.ac.uk/support-gsa/how-to-support/mackintosh-building-fire-fund/

The Peacock Room can be visited after seeing the current exhibition:

M.F. MacDonald and P. de Montfort, curators: ‘An American in London: Whistler and the Thames’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2013–2014: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1 February-13 April 2014; Freer Gallery of Art, May 2–August 17, 2014.

SOURCES

The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp. On-line edition, University of Glasgow, website at:

http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/ including Beatrice Whistler to A Reid, GUW 11635; Stanford White to Whistler, [20 September 1895, GUW 03724].

 

 

WAY’s WHISTLER and WHISTLER’s WAY

One of the pleasures of curating an exhibition is selecting and presenting great works of art: another is meeting lots of interesting people. At Dulwich Picture Gallery I had the pleasure of meeting Charlotte Way, relative of Whistler’s lithographic printers Thomas Way and his son Thomas R. Way. She has kindly allowed me to reproduce here photographs of the Ways, father and son.  

 

This shows the young artist/lithographer Thomas R. Way, looking rather dashing. His correspondence with Whistler and book Memories of James McNeill Whistler (published in 1912), provide penetrating insights into the seriousness of Whistler as artists, craftsman and print-maker.

Another portrait, a photo of Way senior, Master Printer, shows a gentle, smiling, pleasant character, his looks concealing an astute business mind and strong sensibility in print-making. He had his own personal recipes for lithotint and refused to part with them, even to Whistler, although he instructed Whistler in its use, under his professional eye, in the printing office.

Study No. 1: Mr Thomas Way, 1896, lithograph (C.153), Hunterian.

Way’s son recorded that this portrait of his father was painted by gas-light late on a dark winter afternoon in 1896: the flickering light of the gas is echoed in the flickering, grainy strokes of the lithographic crayon.

Way printed proofs of Whistler’s last Nocturne,The Thames, which was drawn by the artist from the Savoy Hotel in 1896. Whistler and his wife Beatrice stayed at the hotel when she was very ill, struck with the cancer that caused herd eath in the following summer. The devastating associations of this lithotint with Beatrice’s suffering and death resulted in Whistler’s refusal to allow Way to print it. Way begged to be allowed to print a limited edition, because it was so very atmospheric and beautiful, but the darkness of the view reflected the depth of Whistler’s grief. Sadly, not only would he not allow it to be printed, but he broke with the Ways soon afterwards. Perhaps they were associated in his mind with the happiness of his early married life, when Beatrice had encouraged a revived interest in lithography. Of perhaps, in his overwrought state, he did not realise how foolish it was to quarrel with the printers who had printed so many of his finest iithographs.

The Thames, Whistler’s last Nocturne, stars in the show that opens next week at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC: An American in Paris: Whistler and the Thames. I am looking forward to it: and, as co-curator, highly recommend it to anyone in range of Washington!

A FLIGHT OF WHISTLER BUTTERFLIES

In 1869, Whistler made a large and elaborate drawing of a nude figure, which was intended to be transferred to canvas, a decorative scheme that was never completed. However, the drawing or cartoon, is now in the Freer Gallery of Art, and it bore, instead of Whistler’s signature, a monogram of his initials ‘JW’ in the form of a butterfly. The ‘J’ was the body, and the ‘W’ the wings.

 

 

Venus, black crayon and white chalk on brown paper,

119.4 x 61.4 cms,

Freer Gallery of Art, F1904.66a-b

This precise butterfly with its angular wings is visible on a square cartouche at lower right. This monogram evolved over the years into the butterfly that became Whistler’s mark, as distinctive as a signature. Within a couple of years he was applying it to his paintings, including the famous portrait of his mother, and views of the Thames.

 In 1871, two paintings of the Thames were exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in London (cat. nos. 225 and 265), Variations in Violet and Green (now in the Musée d’Orsay) and ‘Harmony in Blue-green’ (which was later renamed Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea and is now in the Tate.

 Whistler was away in Liverpool, leaving his faithful followers, Walter and Henry Greaves, to check on the paintings. ‘I am very glad you and Harry have been to the Dudley – and that the two “harmonies” look swell among the crowd’, he wrote to Walter, adding, ‘Have they managed to fit in the little gold flat you know that Clay took down to the Gallery and that they wouldn’t let him put in the frame, but fixed it in themselves? Does it look all right? They have not taken off too much of the butterfly have they?’ 

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (Tate) in the Tretyakow Gallery:

(I took this snap while the show ‘Whistler in Russia’ was being hung).

The butterfly is on the frame at lower right.

At the Dulwich Gallery, the pictures were reviewed favourably by the resident art critic of The Times, Tom Taylor on 14 November 1871:

 ‘’The colour, consistently with the theory of the painter, is carried out into the frames by means of delicate diaperings and ripplings of faint greens and moony blues on their gold and the Japanese influence in which the painter delights is carried even to the introduction of the coloured cartouche, which on Japanese screens bears the address of the painter or seller.’

 It is possible this refers to the rather cramped butterfly painted on the flat between the reeded surfaces of the picture frame.  The other picture in the Dudley exhibition of 1871 was also signed with a butterfly, quite a small one, and presumably both the frame design and the butterfly were as Whistler wanted them. Variations in Violet and Green is signed with a butterfly and dated ‘71’ on the right, and signed with a butterfly on the frame at upper left.

In May 2014, Variations in Violet and Green will be reunited for the first time in a century with its companion piece, Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea in the exhibition An American in London: Whistler and the Thames at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

 Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea

Freer Gallery of Art: F1902.249a-b 

There is a little red and gold butterfly on the frame at left, and a small blue butterfly on a cartouche (which could be interpreted as a signboard) in the painting itself, also at left. Both are variations on Whistler’s original butterfly. The butterfly was to metamorphose further over the next 30 years, adding and losing veins on the wings, antennae, and occasionally, a sting!

 You could say that it became the symbol for Whistler himself, a very serious butterfly.

             Glasgow University Library Special Collections Department    

 

REFERENCE: 

The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855-1880, edited by Georgia Toutziari.

On-line edition, University of Glasgow.

http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence

WHISTLER’S GHOSTS: Margaret MacDonald and Nadine Loach

Whistler’s oil paintings of the Thames, combining closely observed realistic views, expressive brushwork and atmospheric colour, reward close examination. However, they can also conceal surprises, the ghostly records of earlier work. Xrays of two paintings by Whistler have resulted in a remarkable discovery. The paintings are Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (Addison Gallery of American Art) and The Last of Old Westminster (Boston Museum of Fine Arts).

Brown and Silver was commissioned in 1859, probably completed in 1862, and first exhibited in 1865. The Last of Old Westminster is signed and dated 1862.

The Last of Old Westminster

Photograph Copyright 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

It has long been known, from an xray, that there is a self-portrait of the artist, painted at right angles to the Thames riverscape, under Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge.

It shows Whistler at work, painting with brush in hand, but was left unfinished and partly rubbed down. Nevertheless it is a vivid portrayal of the young artist, and was probably painted either in Paris or – more likely –  in London. Either he was not satisfied with the portrait or he needed a canvas to start the painting  Old Battersea Bridge, which was commissioned by the Greek collector Alexander C. Ionides after the Royal Academy exhibition of 1859. If the Bridge is looked at under raking light, traces of the ghostly Whistler can still be seen.

However, we did not know until recently that The Last of Old Westminster was also painted over a portrait, that of a seated woman, possibly a woman reading, which was also painted at right angles to the bridge, and partly rubbed down.

It was Nadine Loach, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, who highlighted this as a significant discovery, and followed up first tantalising piece of information, which noted that there was a figure underneath the painting of Westminster Bridge. This information came in while the picture hung at Dulwich Picture Gallery, but too late to be included in the catalogue. Hopefully it will entertain visitors to the show while it is in Andover and Washington. 

Although it is difficult to be certain, the woman, as seen in the xray, looks like Whistler’s Irish model Joanna Hiffernan. A detail from a drypoint portrait of ‘Jo’, reversed, is illustrated below for comparison.

The two portraits could be considered a pair: they are close in size, Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge being 63.5 x 76.2 cms and The Last of Old Westminster, slightly different in proportion, at 60.96 x 78.1 cms. It is possible that they recorded a significant stage in the relationship between artist and model, as partners in the creation of works of art.

However,  either these intimate portraits were sacrificed in order to make way for more saleable paintings of the river Thames, or Whistler simply felt that the portraits were not working out. Despite his close relationship with Jo, his model, mistress and partner, or perhaps because of it, Whistler may have felt that he could not complete, hang or exhibit two such personal images. And so they were sacrificed for two immensely saleable, exhibitable – and very beautiful – paintings of Thames bridges.

The two bridge pictures are currently on view in the exhibition An American in London: Whistler and the Thames at the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, and move, in May, to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

Further technical examination of the paintings may well confirm these tentative suggestions; and hopefully will be published in due course in an online catalogue of Whistler’s paintings.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
Many thanks to Nadine Loach and colleagues at Dulwich Picture Gallery, to James M. Sousa at the Addison Gallery of American Art, and to Marta Fodor and colleagues in Boston.
CREDITS:

Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge, 1859-62, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 76.2 cms, Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA., Gift of Cornelius Bliss, 1928.55.

The Last of Old Westminster, 1862, Oil on canvas, 60.96 x 78.1 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A. Shuman Collection, Abraham Shuman Fund, 1939.44.

SOURCES: 

A. McLaren Young, M.F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer with H. Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, Yale University Press, 1980.

 The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855-1880, edited by Georgia Toutziari. Online edition, University of Glasgow.http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence

Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, online website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

M.F. MacDonald and P. de Montfort, curators: ‘An American in London: Whistler and the Thames’, Dulwich Picture Gallery,  2013–2014: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1 February-13 April 2014; Freer Gallery of Art, May 2–August 17, 2014.

WHISTLER IN SNOW

An American in London: Whistler and the Thames has had 30,000 visitors in the 11 weeks since it opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery! The run finishes there on Sunday, 12 January 2014. It will probably be rather busy, so get there early!

Then, weather permitting, the exhibition goes on to the Addison Gallery of American Art. An addition to the show will be the bold and beautiful oil painting, Chelsea in Ice (reproduced below). It is currently making its way to Andover, Massachusetts, from Colby College Museum of Art, Maine, where, last time I heard, it was 20 degrees below. The picture should feel right at home!

During the same period, an equal number of people accessed the Whistler etchings website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk/ This is a cool but less extreme way of getting to know about Whistler!

 

AN AMERICAN IN LONDON?

Any exhibition brings out a wide range of people with varying interests. At Dulwich Picture Gallery, the visitors to An American in London: Whistler and the Thames include locals from  south of the river,  Battersea to Bermondsey,  others from foreign parts like Chelsea, drawn to see images of northern fastnesses, and visitors from the rest of the UK, USA and world-wide.

Whistler drew or painted the views of Battersea and Chelsea in considerable detail, which is fortunate, because that is exactly how they are discussed by Londoners.

In Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (lent by the the Addison Gallery, Andover, Connecticut), a  famous landmark, the Crystal Palace is immediately recognised in the far distance to right.  Other sites are less well known, though I hope that this show will result in a steady stream of visitors to The Angel in Bermondsey, to check the view seen in Wapping! But I’m curious about the reactions of foreign visitors. Americans welcome him as their own, if expatriate, artists, like Sargent and Mary Cassatt, but there is some question about the extent of his assimilation, as there could be a question about the title of the exhibition.

Although Whistler undoubtedly was an American, born, baptised, schooled and to some extent educated in America, does the exhibition really show him as an American? the consensus seems to be ‘No’: it reveals him as absorbed in European art and culture, which is hardly surprising since he lived in Europe and indeed in London for most of his life. And yet,  and yet … his early self-portrait (reproduced below) shows a distinctly international young Franco/American/British artist, with low straw hat, black cravat, and linen suit, and longish curly hair – definitely no Victorian city gentleman. And he never renounced his citizenship.

 

 

 

Whistler with a hat, 1859, drypoint, British Museum

The artist exercised his humour on the facts of his birth. ‘the time has gone by when a man shall be born without being consulted -‘ he wrote, ‘Maryland then I accept – my Maryland – and Baltimore – the “city of monuements” [sic] – … charming and artistic – and vaguely associated with Poe – who of course was born elsewhere’  (This letter is in the Whistler online edition, #13373 in  http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence).

Whistler tended to be more American with the British, and British, with Americans, and French, whenever he chose to be.  When the Spanish Fleet was destroyed at Santiago by Admiral Sampson, he exclaimed to his sister-in-law, Rosalind Birnie Philip, ‘London is really too American for me!’ (3 July 1898, #04731 at http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence )

and incidentally it was this Miss Philip who gave Glasgow University its huge Whistler collection, including several wonderful exhibits now starring in An American in London!

“I’ll be back!”

LINKS:

M.F. MacDonald and P. de Montfort, curators: An American in London: Whistler and the Thames, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 16 October 2013 – 12 January 2014:http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/exhibitions/coming_soon/whistler_in_london.aspx

Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, online website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

 The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855-1880, edited by Georgia Toutziari. Online edition, University of Glasgow.http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence

Glasgow University Library at

http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/specialcollections/collectionsa-z/whistlerarchive/

Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow athttp://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/Whistler

WHISTLER’S MEN AND WOMEN

Detail of Wapping, 1860-1864, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Of the man and women who participate in Whistler’s Thames pictures and prints, we know little, yet they are nearly always distinctive figures, characterised by sex, pose, class and character.  Sometimes friends posed for Whistler. Ralph and Ralph Thomas (father and son) posed as artist and admiring spectator in the etching The Little Pool (G.79). In other scenes, the local figures are rarely identified. Whistler’s boatman in The Pool (G.49) is not named, nor the dark-skinned boy in Eagle Wharf (G.50) or the handsome young workman in Black Lion Wharf (G.54).

The Lime-Burner, 1859, etching and drypoint (G.55 state 2/2)                                       Colby College Museum of Art (64.2004)

 An exception is WILLIAM JONES of W. Jones & Co., who appears in the centre of his workshop in The Lime-Burner.  The workshops were at 241 and 242 Wapping High Street, backing onto East London Lime Wharf (the Thames is seen beyond the wharf). A flat cap on his head, he wears a dark waistcoat with narrow reveres buttoned over a white shirt, light coloured straight trousers and broad work shoes. He stands with one hand in his pocket, leaning on a couple of barrels. In his other hand he holds a long stemmed pipe – possibly one of the clay pipes that litter the Thames foreshore to this day.  He is looking at the artist, serious, a little tired perhaps, quietly comfortable in his own territory.

Sketch of Wapping in a letter from Whistler’s to Henri Fantin Latour,                                        [January/June 1861] , Library of Congress, Washington DC

FOR Wapping – a vividly impressionistic painting – Whistler employed a succession of models, and changed both the arrangement of the figures and background over several years.  At first he showed three figures sitting and talking on the balcony of the ‘Angel’, a pub in Bermondsey.  The pub is still there, with its narrow balcony leaning out over the swift rushing river, and one can check out the exact position of the figures and the beer. The figure at left was Whistler’s Irish mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, who (according to the 1861 census) was staying in Greenwich with the artist, as his wife. At first he posed her leaning on the railing and looking to left over the river. Then he tightened the composition, showing her seated and turned to right, towards two men, one young, one old. Judging from a sketch drawn by Whistler for his friend Henri Fantin Latour, the men were leaning towards Jo, talking eagerly. Jo was shown as a ‘putain’ or ‘molly’ – as prostitute, mistress or courtesan.  According to Whistler, Jo’s expression was seductive but also rather bored, as if she was winking at them, and implying that she had heard it all before.

Wapping, 1860-1864, oil on canvas,

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

However, then he replaced the central man with a friend, the artist Alphonse Legros, who posed, according to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as ‘a sort of Spanish sailor’.  A boatman or sailor appears at right, identified by Whistler’s biographers, E.R. and J. Pennell, as ‘a portrait of one of Greaves’ men’,  from the Greaves’ boatyard below Whistler’s Chelsea house in Lindsey Row.  Jo, who at first had worn a brightly coloured patterned blouse, posed in a more modest outfit, her dress black velvet, her expression remote and reflective, and her hair, a glorious golden Venetian red.

MORE ON EXHIBITING WHISTLER IN MY NEXT BLOG;

LINKS:

Video, starring myself, Whistler (see below), and co-curator, Patricia de Montfort!

:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ctaRY3TxnU&feature=autoshare

M.F. MacDonald and P. de Montfort, curators: ‘An American in London: Whistler and the Thames’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 16 October 2013 – 12 January 2014: http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/exhibitions/coming_soon/whistler_in_london.aspx

Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, online website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

 

The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855-1880, edited by G. Toutziari. Online edition, University of Glasgow. http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence

Glasgow University Library at http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/specialcollections/collectionsa-z/whistlerarchive/

Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow at http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/Whistler

Freer/Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC at http://www.asia.si.edu/

Colby College Museum of Art at http://www.colby.edu/academics_cs/museum/collection/whistler/

The Art Institute of Chicago at http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/artist/Whistler,+James+McNeill

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC at http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/

Whistler and the Thames: Personal glimpses

Price’s Candle Factory, 1876/1877, drypoint (G.166. state 3/13)

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (1943.3.8486)

WHILE we were hanging the Whistler exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, the local curators and technicians enjoyed identifying sites and situations shown in Whistler’s prints and paintings. One curator said that she and her parents had gone to Price’s Candle Factory, on York Road, Battersea, to buy candles when she was young. Price’s website gives the history of the firm (now based in Bedford) at  http://www.prices-candles.co.uk/history. Early publicity emphasized the quality of the light and ‘aesthetic’ beauty of Price’s candles. Whistler’s fine drypoint shows the array of warehouses, chimneys, and waterfront of the London works on the south side of the Thames. It also includes a barge, a small sailing boat, and – very faintly – three people in a rowing boat (who had apparently rowed away or sunk, or whatever, by the time Whistler completed the etching).

The Pool, 1859, etching and drypoint (G.49, state 6/6)

Colby College Museum of Art (2013.474).

WHISTLER’S friend William Michael Rossetti remarked that the artist’s etchings ‘have always shown a marked propensity for shore-life, river life, boat-life, barge-life – for everything which hints of old wharves, jetties, piers, rigging, bow-windows overlooking reaches of the peopled-stream, and that class of hard-fisted, square-shouldered, solid and stolid-faced men, on whom the odour of tar and tobacco is equally incorporate.’ (The Reader, 4 April 1863). Viewers recognised the river men, as vivid and familiar as characters in a Dickens’ novel. When the ‘Thames Set’ was finally published in 1871, an art critic, F.G. Stephens, wrote that ‘in Rotherhithe, ‘a skipper and his mate, smoke sedately, without the remotest idea on conversation’, and in The Pool, ‘a waterman in a lumbering wherry … is evidently sitting with some complacency for his “picture” as the artist willed’ (The Athenaeum, 26 August 1871).

EVEN today the truth of Whistler’s vision is appreciated by the successors of Whistler’s watermen. When he was hanging the etchings in the first room of the exhibition at Dulwich, the senior picture handler – Will Easterling – mentioned that both his father and grandfather had been watermen. His father Ray was a champion rower, winner of the race for Doggett’s coat and badge in 1960, and had competed in the Thames barge races. After seeing the Thames etchings at the Tate in 1994, Ray Easterling commented that Whistler’s etchings were the only ones that gave a true picture of what the Thames bargees and watermen were like – of what it was like to be a waterman working on the river at that time.  He thought the Whistler images were wonderful, giving a real and true picture of life on the Thames.

MORE ON EXHIBITING WHISTLER IN MY NEXT BLOG; MEANWHILE:

LINKS:

A video, starring myself (and Whistler, and my co-curator, Patricia de Montfort)!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ctaRY3TxnU&feature=autoshare

M.F. MacDonald and P. de Montfort, curators: ‘An American in London: Whistler and the Thames’, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 16 October 2013 – 12 January 2014: http://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/exhibitions/coming_soon/whistler_in_london.aspx

Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, online website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

 The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855-1880, edited by Georgia Toutziari. Online edition, University of Glasgow.http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence

Glasgow University Library at

http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/specialcollections/collectionsa-z/whistlerarchive/

Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow at http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/Whistler

Freer/Sackler, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC at http://www.asia.si.edu/

Colby College Museum of Art at http://www.colby.edu/academics_cs/museum/collection/whistler/

The Art Institute of Chicago at http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/artist/Whistler,+James+McNeill

National Gallery of Art, Washington DC at http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/

REVIEWS OF WHISTLER AT DULWICH ****:

Richard Dorment, Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/10393447/Whistler-and-the-Thames-Dulwich-Picture-Gallery-review.html

Katherine Tyrrell’s Art Blog:

http://makingamark.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/review-american-in-london-whistler-and-Thames.html

Eddy Frankel, Timeout:

http://www.timeout.com/london/popular-venues/whistler-and-the-thames-an-american-in-london

Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3cf7420e-34ee-11e3-8148-00144feab7de.html#axzz2iLwSKpN9

Adrian Hamilton, The Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/the-river-runs-deep-whistler-in-london-8892743.html

Martin Ballie, The Art Newspaper:

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Dulwich-exhibition-redefines-Whistlers-London-landscape/30700

Ben Miller, Culture24:

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/painting-and-drawing/art456665