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Whistler on Exhibition

Magazine Antiques, June, 1995 by Margaret F. MacDonald

From the beginning, Whistler's etchings were widely admired and were accepted in 1859 both by the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy of Art in London. The first painting he submitted to the Salon, in 1859, was At the Piano (Pl. VI), which was rejected in Paris but accepted by the Royal Academy in 1860. The canvas marks his graduation from three years of student life in Paris. during which time he became a follower of Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and the realist movement. At the Royal Academy, the painting was admired by academicians and Pre-Raphaelites alike. Praise from the English painter George Frederick Watts (1817-1904)(1) led the Greek shipping magnate Alexander Constantine Ionides (1810-1890) to commission Whistler to paint a portrait of his son Luke (1837-1924).(2) Despite this success, however, Whistler's exhibition record at the academy was uneven. In 1862 Alone with the Tide (now entitled The Coast of Brittany; Pl. IV) and The Thames in Ice,(3) both of them realistic and colorful paintings, were accepted, along with his etching Rotherhithe [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED], which combined sympathetic character studies of seamen with intricately detailed wharves and ships. On the other hand, the ambivalent subject of his Irish mistress Joanna Hiffernan, a painting he first entitled The White Girl (Pl. V), was rejected both by the Royal Academy in 1862 and the Paris Salon the following year. The painting was exhibited by Matthew Morgan at his small gallery on Berners Sweet in London labeled "Rejected at the Academy." As Whistler wrote to his friend George Aloysius Lucas (1824-1909), an American dealer, he was "waging an open war with the Academy."(4) In 1863 the painting was a succes de scandale along with Edouard Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe(5) at the Salon des Refuses in Paris. Le Boulevard commented about The White Girl: "Que d'elegance, que d'habilete, quelle grace dans cette toile qui fait rire les sots!" (What elegance, skill, and grace in this painting, which makes fools laugh!).(6)

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Whistler was undeterred by the academy's rejection of The White Girl and by the fact that those of his paintings it did accept were hung at a great height. His drypoint of Joanna Hiffernan entitled Weary (Pl. VII) was included in the 1863 Royal Academy exhibition, prompting one critic to remark on its "exquisite tone and 'colour'."(7)

Oriental subjects such as Purple and Rose (Pl. VIII) and realistic depictions of the river Thames (see Pl. X) found admirers at the academy exhibitions of 1864 and 1865, respectively. The latter was described by the London Daily Telegraph on May 11, 1865, as "the most remarkable landscape in the room," combining "unity of sentiment and meaning with what he never fails in, harmony of colour." At the 1865 academy exhibition Whistler also showed Symphony in White, No. 2 (Pl. III), which suggests the aesthetic sensibilities of a middle-class environment with its Oriental porcelain, fans, and flowers. It shows a genre, reflective Joanna wearing a wedding ring and seeming less uncompromising than she did in The White Girl. On June 3, 1865, the London Saturday Review described the painting as "most gracefully felt, but less than half-painted."

In 1867 Whistler was well represented in London and, for a change, in Paris, where his work was shown beth at the Salon and the Exposition Universelle. However, both in 1868 and 1869, just as he was becoming known, he failed to complete any work for exhibition. He felt that his painting rested on an inadequate foundation - Courbet's color rather than the sort of meticulous drawing epitomized by the work of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1780-1867). In an attempt to correct this he followed the academic technique of Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893), whose semi-classical compositions he had admired at the 1865 Royal Academy exhibition.(8) Moore's technique involved making drawings, followed by small color studies, and then full-scale cartoons, which ultimately became the basis for the finished canvases. Although Whistler did for a time follow this method, he felt he was coming too close to Moore's style in the Six Projects,(9) commissioned by his new patron, Frederick Richards Leyland (1831-1892), a Liverpool shipping magnate.(10)

In 1870 Whistler exhibited at the Royal Academy an Oriental subject, Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony,(11) which he had begun six years earlier. He went on to make drawings and oil sketches of the composition,(12) intending to enlarge it for the Paris Salon, which he never did.

During the 1870's Whistler destroyed or painted over several of the Six Projects and concentrated on portraits and Nocturnes of the Thames. His most famous portrait is that of his mother (Pl. IX), painted in 1871 on the back of a canvas originally used for one of his figure compositions. The austere composition and somber colors enhance the intensity of Whistler's sympathetic view of his devout, widowed mother. The portrait was much admired by his friends, including the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), and by Leyland, who commissioned Whistler to do portraits of his whole family.(13) It brought other commissions as well, and it induced the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) to allow Whistler to paint his portrait.(14)

Whistler on Exhibition

Magazine Antiques, June, 1995 by Margaret F. MacDonald

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