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Art History
ART HISTORY James McNeill Whistler
By treating his portraits as “arrangements” and his landscapes as fields of colour, the American artist was ahead of his time, as STEVE PILL explains
OPPOSITE PAGE Sketch for 'The Balcony', 186770, oil on panel, 61x48cm James McNeill Whistler was an American artist, trained in Paris and famed for his London nocturnes, yet his connections to Scotland ran surprisingly deep. He only visited the country once as a teenager, yet he was embraced as one of their own. The Glasgow Boys called him “The Master” and petitioned for the Corporation of Glasgow to buy his Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 2: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, becoming the first public collection to own Whistler's work. The University of Glasgow, meanwhile, gave him an honorary doctorate and is now home to the world’s largest public display of the artist’s work, comprising 80 oil paintings and more than 1,700 works on paper, as well as almost 300 artworks made by his late wife Beatrix, all thanks to a bequest from his sister-in-law Rosalind.
The origin of these Celtic connections is the subject of one of Whistler’s most famous paintings, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother. Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler was born in North Carolina, yet also had Scottish ancestry, being descended from the Highland McNeills of Barra. “[James] would accentuate these aspects of his lineage for exotic effect after becoming an expatriate,” wrote his biographer, Lisa N Peters.
That maternal portrait was painted while Whistler was living with his mother in London’s Chelsea. Although it is now celebrated as a “Victorian Mona Lisa”, it came narrowly close to being refused by the Royal Academy of Art’s annual exhibition in 1872, apparently on the grounds of it being presented as an “arrangement” not a portrait. Nevertheless, it was a sign that the artist’s focus was shifting.
Born on 11 July 1834, James Abbott McNeill Whistler approached his early work with the precision of a railroad engineer’s son. His Parisian studies officially took place at the atelier of Marc Gleyre and the Ecole Impériale, though in truth he learnt as much making copies of Old Masters paintings in the Louvre that he sold to pay his way. He picked up Rembrandt’s fondness for impasto marks and heavy shadows, while also bonding over a love of Courbet and Corot with the fellow artists Henri Fantin-Latour and Alphonse Legros in what they called the “Society of Three”.
After settling in London, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti was among the regular guests to the Whistler house and the influence of that artist and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites had already been evident in the American painter’s breakthrough work, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl. It was famously rejected by both London’s Royal Academy and the Paris Salon, yet it emerged alongside another enduring masterpiece, Manet’s Déjeuner sur l'herbe, at the Salon des Refusés, a Napoleon III- sponsored exhibition of rejects.
In calling his works “harmonies”, “arrangements”, “variations” and “symphonies”, Whistler was adopting the language of music to describe his art. These experiments clearly
© THE HUNTERIAN, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
LEFT Sea and Sand: Domburg, 1900, watercolour on paper, 21x13cm
excited the American artist, even if his contemporaries struggled to share his vision. Speaking of his Nocturne: Grey and Gold, Westminster Bridge, now part of Glasgow’s Burrell Collection, Whistler asserted that this muted piece of abstract painting was less about the realities of the scene and more the sensation of colour itself. “All I know is that my combination of grey and gold is the basis of the picture,” he said, noting sadly that this was also “precisely what my friends cannot grasp”.
One contemporary who was attuned to his exploratory works was composer Claude Debussy, who took inspiration for his three-movement Nocturnes from Whistler’s paintings of the same name. The Frenchman said his piece was “an experiment in the different combinations that can be obtained from one colour – what a study in grey would be in painting,” yet the American artist remained more alive to the subtle repetitions of hues in his own Nocturnes. “The same colour ought to appear in the picture continually here and there, in the same way that a thread appears in an embroidery,” he wrote in a letter to Fantin-Latour.
As part of Rosalind’s bequest, the university received a vast collection of correspondence and art materials, including brushes, paintboxes and even paints, from ornately-topped pots of Newman’s “Luminous Body Colour” to tubes of oil pigment from Düsseldorf’s Dr Franz Schoenfeld – the founder of Lukas. A selection of these will be on display as part of the Hunterian Art Gallery’s new exhibition, Whistler: Art and Legacy. Although dried up, these artefacts provide a tangible connection to an artist who made his best paintings some 150 years ago, while also offering insight into his methods. We can discern, for example, that Whistler’s watercolour palette included Lemon Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Vermilion, Cobalt Blue, Antwerp Blue and Chinese White – the latter an opaque colour often used for highlights. (He often bought
© THE HUNTERIAN, UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW materials from L Cornelissen & Son, a historic London art shop seemingly unchanged today.)
His oil palette closely followed those of the Old Masters, including Venetian Red, Cobalt Blue and the earth colours, while eschewing modern pigments made fashionable by the Impressionists as he claimed that they would “spoil” his pictures.
Perhaps more so than any other aspect of his practice, Whistler’s watercolours speak of the direction in which his work might have taken had he not succumbed, at the age of 69, to the ill-health that had plagued his life. During the 1880s, he presented three solo exhibitions devoted to his watercolours, and he was proud of his increasingly expressive technique – each was framed and presented like an oil painting. Critics at the time were unmoved, with one noting that while these works were “eminently clever and effective jottings”, they were also “the kind of things which artists do not usually exhibit”.
Whistler persevered and one of the last works in the new Glasgow show reveals just how far he was willing to push things in that respect. Sea and Sand: Domburg was painted in the summer of 1900, during a stay with an artist friend in the Dutch resort. It could be crudely dismissed as another “jotting” yet to do so would ignore the sheer economy of marks with which it was rendered. There is almost no detail here, as Whistler makes good on his regular exhortations to his students to embrace simple designs, tonal harmony and economy of marks.
The beach is a wider continuous application, while the North Sea is conjured from an accumulation of washes, like the waves themselves. In fact, if you omit those figures, you are left with three distinct bands of colour, like a vast Rothko colour field painting some 50 years ahead of its time. Whistler had been toying with similar, simplified portrait-format landscapes for at least 35 years, though Sea and Sand: Domburg is more pared back even than his early oil studies from the beach at Trouville.
Like the very best of artists, Whistler had no time to wait for the world to catch up. As the new exhibition at the Hunterian will no doubt underline, his greatest legacy is having opened the door to a world of ideas to which almost every artist, working in the 20th century and beyond, owes a debt. Whistler: Art and Legacy runs until 31 October at the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. www.gla.ac.uk/ whistlerartandlegacy
ABOVE Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses, 1864, oil on canvas, 51x76cm
