Smithsonian Institution

Scholarly Press
Palaces of Art

 Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism

Edited by

Lee Glazer and Linda Merrill

A Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge 

Smithsonian Institution

Scholarly Press

Washington DC

2013

WhistlerBook.indb i WhistlerBook.indb i 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
The “Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism” symposium was held at 

the Freer Gallery of Art and was made possible by the generosity of the Lunder Foundation.

Published by 

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION SCHOLARLY PRESS

P.O. Box 37012, MRC 957

Washington, D.C. 20013-7012

www.scholarlypress.si.edu

Compilation copyright © 2013 Smithsonian Institution

The acknowledgments, “The Whistler Etchings Project,” “The Artist as Muse,” “Interior Motives: Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking,” and “Networks of Modernism: A New Look at Whistler in Japan,” are in the public domain. The rights to all other text and images in this publication, including cover 

and interior designs, are owned either by the Smithsonian Institution, by contributing authors, or by 

third parties. Fair use of materials is permitted for personal, educational, or noncommercial purposes. 

Users must cite author and source of content, must not alter or modify copyrighted content, and must 

comply with all other terms or restrictions that may be applicable. Users are responsible for securing 

permission from a rights holder for any other use.

Cover image: James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876–1877. Detail of 

ceiling. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood, 421.6 × 613.4 × 1026.2 cm. (overall). Freer 

Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism (Symposium) (2011 : Freer Gallery of Art)

 Palaces of art : Whistler and the art worlds of aestheticism / Edited by Lee Glazer and Linda Merrill.

 pages cm. -- (A Smithsonian contribution to knowledge)

 Includes index.

 ISBN 978-1-935623-29-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-935623-31-1 (ebook) 1. Aesthetic movement 

(Art)--Congresses. 2. Whistler, James McNeill, 1834-1903--Congresses. I. Glazer, Lee (Lee Stephens), 

editor of compilation. II. Merrill, Linda, 1959- editor of compilation. III. Title. 

 N6767.5.A3P35 2013

 759.13--dc23

 2013013749

ISBN-13 Print: 978-1-935623-29-8

ISBN-13 Online: 978-1-935623-31-1

Printed in the United States of America

 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1992. 

the smithsonian’s museums of asian art

WhistlerBook.indb ii WhistlerBook.indb ii 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Palaces of ArtWhistlerBook.indb iii WhistlerBook.indb iii 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
ContentsWhistlerBook.indb iv WhistlerBook.indb iv 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Preface vii

Lee Glazer 

Acknowledgments viii

Abbreviations viii

Introduction 1

Lee Glazer and Margaret R. Laster 

Whistler in the Art World of the Twenty-First Century 13

The Artist as Muse 15

Ruth Fine 

The Whistler Etchings Project 27

Margaret F. MacDonald 

Whistler and Art of the Americas 39

Erica E. Hirshler 

Inside the Palace of Art: Whistler’s Aesthetic Subjectivities 53

Subject and Object in Whistler: The Context of Physiological Aesthetics 55

Caroline Arscott 

Whistler’s Peacock Room and the Artist as Magus 67

Sally-Anne Huxtable 

Interior Motives: Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking 81

John Siewert 

Whistler’s Paris Studio: Place and Meaning 93

Anna Gruetzner Robins 

Other Voices, Other Rooms: Beyond Whistlerian Aestheticism 105

Aesthetes on Display: “Not Masculine and Progressive but Reclusive 

and Retrospective” 107

Susan P. Casteras 

Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac: Rossetti’s Material and Virtual Goods 121

Julie Codell 

Aestheticism Meets Arts and Crafts: Decorative Art on Display 135

Imogen Hart 

Outside the Palace of Art: Global Networks of Aestheticism 147

Whistler, Aestheticism, and the Networked World 149

Melody Barnett Deusner 

Networks of Modernism: A New Look at Whistler in Japan 165

Ayako Ono 

Enlisting Aestheticism: Beauty, Valor, and the Great War 173

Linda Merrill 

Bibliography 187

Contributors 199

Index 205

WhistlerBook.indb v WhistlerBook.indb v 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
PrefaceWhistlerBook.indb vi WhistlerBook.indb vi 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
This volumebrings together papers that were fi rst presented in October 2011 at 

an international symposium held at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art. Made 

possible by the generosity of the Lunder Foundation, “Palaces of Art: Whistler 

and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism” was the inaugural event of the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, a scholarly partnership founded in 2010 by the Freer Gallery, 

the Colby College Museum of Art, and the University of Glasgow. The Art Institute of 

Chicago joined in 2012. As caretakers of the world’s largest collections of the work of 

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), the consortium is not only dedicated to supporting 

and disseminating new research on the American expatriate artist but also encouraging 

scholarship that moves beyond monographic or biographical approaches to consider the 

various “art worlds” in which Whistler and his contemporaries operated. The diversity 

of topics and methodologies deployed at this landmark conference refl ected this expansive, pluralizing approach. In addition to refl ecting on Whistler’s place in the history 

of art, speakers considered such diverse topics as the construction of aesthetic subjectivities, the relationship between Aestheticism and commodity culture, and the role of 

global networks in the transmission and reception of Whistlerian style. 

Gathered together, these conference proceedings challenge preconceptions about 

Aestheticism and Whistler’s place within the Aesthetic movement. This notoriously thinskinned painter, who had a particular talent for “the gentle art of making enemies,” was 

also profoundly interconnected to a cosmopolitan array of artists, writers, collectors, 

and dealers. Here, authors convincingly overturn the long-held notion of Whistler as an 

eccentric loner who operated outside of conventional art historical narratives, whether 

American, British, or modernist. Networks, mutual infl uences, collaborative endeavors, and the enduring power of artistic creation and aesthetic attention are some of the 

themes that recur throughout this book. Far from being conclusive, these essays open up 

the fi eld of Whistler studies and will doubtless inspire new work on Whistler’s aesthetic 

vision and the complexity of his cultural contexts. 

Lee Glazer 

Associate Curator of American Art

Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery

WhistlerBook.indb vii WhistlerBook.indb vii 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
viii Palaces of Art

Acknowledgments

The Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies—comprising the Smithsonian’s Freer 

Gallery of Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, the University of Glasgow, and the Art 

Institute of Chicago—is dedicated to producing and disseminating innovative research 

on the art of James McNeill Whistler and his international circle of contemporaries. We 

are exceedingly grateful to the Lunder Foundation, whose generosity allowed for the 

creation of the consortium in 2010, and to Peter and Paula Lunder personally for their 

unstinting support of this important collaboration. This book and the 2011 symposium at 

the Freer Gallery of Art from which it developed demonstrate the Lunder Consortium’s 

commitment to broadening scholarship around the Aesthetic period, and we owe a huge 

debt of gratitude to our contributors as well as those who attended the conference for 

helping us realize our mission. 

We are also grateful to Julian Raby, The Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur 

M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art, and Massumeh Farhad, chief curator, 

whose enthusiasm for Whistler and American art in a museum better known for its 

Asian collections was instrumental in making the conference the best attended scholarly 

symposium in the Freer’s history. Margaret R. Laster, the consortium’s fi rst doctoral fellow, developed the conference theme and put together a top-notch program, and Tyler 

Boenecke, the Lunder Consortium program assistant, handled countless logistical and administrative details with poise and skill. Adina Brosnan-McGee created a fi ttingly elegant 

graphic identity for the consortium, and Jenna Vaccaro did the initial image research for 

the publication. Maya Foo, curatorial specialist at the Freer and Sackler, deserves special 

recognition for her deft management of conference and publication matters too numerous to list. All of this work would have been impossible without the guiding wisdom of 

the consortium’s founding partners, namely, Sharon Corwin, Elizabeth Finch, and Lauren 

Lessing at Colby and Pamela Robertson, Margaret F. MacDonald, and Patricia de Montfort at the University of Glasgow. Finally, we are grateful to Ginger Strader and Deborah 

Stultz at the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, who ably guided us through the 

preparation of the manuscript and its production.

Abbreviations

C The Art Institute of Chicago. The Lithographs of James 

McNeill Whistler. Vol. 1, A Catalogue Raisonné, edited 

by Harriet K. Stratis and Martha Tedeschi; catalogue 

entries by Nesta R. Spink, Harriet K. Stratis, and Martha 

Tedeschi. Essays by Katharine Lochnan. Vol. 2, Correspondence and Technical Studies, edited by Martha 

Tedeschi; essays by Nicholas Smale and Harriet K. 

Stratis; contributions by David Kiehl and Kevin Sharp. 

Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago in association 

with the Arie and Ida Crown Memorial, 1998.

FGAA Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery 

Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 

Charles Lang Freer Papers. 

WhistlerBook.indb viii WhistlerBook.indb viii 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
 Preface ix

G Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock. James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a Catalogue Raisonné. Glasgow: 

University of Glasgow, 2011. Online edition at http://

etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

GUL Glasgow University Library, Glasgow, Scotland. Unless 

stated otherwise, this refers to the Whistler Collection, Special Collections.

GUW 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. Glasgow: University of 

Glasgow, 2003–2010. Online edition at http://www.

whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence. 

M Margaret F. MacDonald. James McNeill Whistler: 

Drawings, Pastels, and Watercolours; A Catalogue 

Raisonné. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

PWC Pennell-Whistler Collection, Manuscript Division, 

Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Whistler, The Gentle Art James McNeill Whistler. The Gentle Art of Making 

Enemies. 2nd ed. London: W. Heinemann, 1892.

Whistler, Ten O’Clock James McNeill Whistler. Mr. Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock.” 

Delivered 1885. London: Chatto and Windus, 1888. 

Reprint, London: Pallas Athene, 2011.

YMSM Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, Robin 

Spencer, and Hamish Miles. The Paintings of James 

McNeill Whistler. New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 1980.

WhistlerBook.indb ix WhistlerBook.indb ix 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Palaces of ArtWhistlerBook.indb x WhistlerBook.indb x 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Introduction

Lee Glazer and Margaret R. Laster

The title of this collection of essays riffs on Tennyson’s poem “The Palace of Art,” 

in which the reader is taken on a lengthy verbal tour of a lavishly decorated “pleasure-house” where the speaker aspires to live in “God-like isolation,” absorbed 

only in the contemplation of beauty.1 Although he fi nally acknowledges the selfi shness 

and futility of his desire to inhabit a self-created world apart, the speaker’s longing for 

a purely artistic realm retained its potency, both in the fi nal lines of the poem itself and 

in its afterlife in the Victorian imagination. The phrase “palace of art” became a fi gure 

of speech signifying the artfully decorated interiors of the Aesthetic movement and the 

escapist aspirations of its adherents. The use of the plural “palaces” and “art worlds” 

invoked here, in a book about James McNeill Whistler (Figure 1) and his coevals, is intended to problematize these notions of artistic autonomy and escapism and function as 

a shorthand acknowledgement of the varied and complex nature of Aestheticism as it is 

considered by our authors. 

We regard it as especially fi tting that their essays began as talks delivered at a 

symposium held in the fall of 2011 at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where 

Whistler’s Peacock Room (Figure 2) has been on permanent display since the museum 

opened in 1923. There is perhaps no more iconic embodiment of a palace of art than this 

storied space, the only extant example of interior decoration by Whistler. When the 

expatriate American redecorated the dining room of his patron Frederick Richards Leyland as a “harmony in blue and gold,” he never doubted its place in the history of art as 

an inviolable “heirloom of the artist.” Its complex intertwining of patterns and synthesis 

of multicultural, transhistorical references represented the artist’s idea that “the story of 

the beautiful is already complete.”2

 For Whistler—to shift back to Tennyson’s architectural metaphor—the Peacock Room was intended as a room in the “Palace of Art,” existing in a realm apart from the particularities of time, place, and historical circumstance. 

As he declared to Leyland, “The work just created, alone remains the fact—and that it 

happened in the house of this one or that one is merely the anecdote.”3

Whistler anticipated—even encouraged—the anecdotes that followed, but he could 

never have imagined the room’s dynamic future history. Rather than remaining static 

over the last 130 years, the Peacock Room has undergone a variety of geographical and 

stylistic incarnations to suit the changing tastes of its owners and audiences, proving 

surprisingly amenable to new contexts and interpretations. Indeed, the Peacock Room, 

far from being self-suffi cient and “already complete,” demonstrates that stories of the 

beautiful are continually retold, shaped by individual biography; travel; the circulation of 

artistic objects; critical reception; and social, commercial, and aesthetic networks. Whistler’s canonical room, and the spatial, social, and decorative issues that it engages as an 

extant Aesthetic interior, became, in effect, an emblem for our symposium. In addition to 

the fact that some of the papers proposed new interpretations of the Peacock Room, the 

site itself also allowed those who participated in the symposium, and those who attended 

WhistlerBook.indb 1 WhistlerBook.indb 1 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
2 Palaces of Art

it, a uniquely charged aesthetic encounter, an experience we 

hope to build upon in the expanded discussions that follow. 

Stories of the Room

Before it became a work of art, the Peacock Room had 

been designed by the architect Thomas Jeckyll to showcase 

Leyland’s collection of blue-and-white Kangxi porcelain.4 In 

this iteration, the room was a Victorian version of the Rococo 

porzellanzimmer: it featured brightly patterned leather wall 

hangings, pendant gaslights evoking Chinese lanterns, and an 

extensive lattice of shelving. In 1876 and 1877, Whistler, inspired 

by the brilliant colors and sinuous patterns on the blue-andwhite pots, transformed it from a porcelain cabinet into a total 

work of art, signifi ed by the abstract primary title: Harmony in 

Blue and Gold. This was the version of the room that Leyland, 

despite his famous falling out with the artist, lived with until his 

death in 1892. 

When its future owner, the American collector Charles 

Lang Freer (Figure 3), saw the room for the fi rst time in 1902, 

its shelves were bare (Figure 4). The pots had been sold by Leyland’s estate, and the current resident of Prince’s Gate, Blanche 

Watney, was not a “chinamaniac.” But Freer did not care for 

FIGURE 2. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876–1877. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, 

leather, and wood, 421.6 × 613.4 × 1026.2 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang 

Freer, F1904.61.

FIGURE 1. James McNeill Whistler, 1885. 

Photogravure attributed to Mortimer Menpes (1859–1938). Signed with the butterfl y 

and inscribed by Whistler, probably in 1899, 

“To Charles L. Freer—à un de ces jours!” 

Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery 

of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives, 

Washington, DC.

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Introduction 3

blue-and-white porcelain, in any case, fi nding its colors too bright and its surfaces too 

slick. Perhaps he also saw chinamania—and the extravagant decorations themselves—as 

an embarrassingly Victorian relic. So, when he ultimately bought the room in 1904, it was 

from a sense of duty to his old friend Whistler. 

After sailing across the Atlantic in twenty-seven crates, the room was reassembled 

in a specially built annex to Freer’s Detroit mansion. There he eventually transformed it 

into a staging area for his collections and a space where he could develop his concept of 

universal formal correspondences—what he called “points of contact”—between American and Asian art. Unlike the room’s original owner and its creator, for whom China and 

Japan were places of pure fantasy, Freer made fi ve trips to Asia, and some of the pieces 

he displayed in the Peacock Room were purchased during these travels. Many more, 

however, were acquired in New York and Paris from dealers (some Western, some 

Japanese, with outposts in New York and Boston) whose wares extended far beyond the 

Kangxi export porcelain favored by Whistler and Leyland. Freer was not simply using the 

room as open storage for his vast collection. Rather, he was treating it as an aesthetic 

laboratory, experimenting with various chromatic arrangements, often seeming to treat 

the pots, as Louise Cort has observed, as strokes of color on a vast, three-dimensional 

canvas (see Figures 5 and 6).5

 Freer was so pleased with the overall effect that in 1908 

he commissioned a series of photographs (Figures 7 and 8), which formed the basis for a 

special exhibition in 2011, The Peacock Room Comes to America.

6

Following Freer’s death in 1919, the Peacock Room was transported to the Freer 

Gallery, and for its fi rst sixty years in Washington, it remained almost empty, with no 

more than a half dozen ceramics drawn from Freer’s collection occupying the uppermost 

shelves. It was not until 1984 that David Curry, then curator of American art, installed 

FIGURE 3. Charles Lang Freer, ca. 1901. Charles 

Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and 

Arthur M. Sackler Archives, Washington, DC.

FIGURE 4. Peacock Room in London, 1904. Charles Lang 

Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler 

Archives, Washington, DC.

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4 Palaces of Art

FIGURE 6. Peacock Room, detail. Photo courtesy Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

FIGURE 5. Peacock Room, 2011, at the Freer Gallery of Art, installed with Charles Lang Freer’s ceramics. Photo courtesy Freer 

Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

WhistlerBook.indb 4 WhistlerBook.indb 4 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Introduction 5

a few pieces of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain 

as part of an exhibition celebrating the sesquicentenary of Whistler’s birth.7

 A few years later, the 

Peacock Room underwent a major conservation 

campaign, revealing chromatic harmonies that had 

long been obscured by decades of grime and providing a brilliant new backdrop for the display of 

Chinese porcelain. Under the direction of the curator, Linda Merrill, dozens more pieces of Kangxi 

porcelain were acquired, restoring some semblance of the room’s appearance in Whistler’s day 

(see Figure 2). It was a revelation, allowing visitors 

a more complete understanding of how the room 

fi t into Whistler’s oeuvre and the larger context 

of Victorian art, and that version of the room, on 

view from 1993 until 2011, is the one that most 

scholars and museum visitors are familiar with. 

So the reinstallation of the room for The Peacock 

Room Comes to America came as something of a 

shock: an iconic Aesthetic masterpiece radically 

changed in appearance, its Whistlerian decorations recontextualized to fi t a later chapter in the 

room’s history (see Figures 5 and 6). Participants 

in the 2011 symposium debated the aesthetic 

advantages and historiographic justifi cations of the 

different installations, and several speakers proposed new interpretations. The Peacock Room, 

with its varied objects and its complicated “biography” (to borrow Linda Merrill’s apt term), continues to provoke questions about our changing 

attitudes toward art and those involved in creating 

it. In short, it embodies just how permeable the 

walls of the “Palace of Art” can be. This idea is 

the unifying thread that binds together the diverse 

essays in this book, which add to an extensive and 

ever-growing body of scholarship on Whistler and 

his varied points of contact.

The State of the Field

The symposium “Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism” was 

the inaugural event of the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, a scholarly partnership founded in 2010 by the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution, the 

Colby College Museum of Art, and the University of Glasgow. The Art Institute of Chicago joined in 2012.8

 As caretakers of what are collectively the world’s largest holdings 

of the works of James McNeill Whistler, the consortium is dedicated to supporting and 

presenting new scholarship on this artist and the milieus in which he worked, aiming to 

FIGURE 7. Peacock Room in Detroit, 1908. Photograph by 

George R. Swain. Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of 

Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives, Washington, DC.

FIGURE 8. Peacock Room in Detroit, 1908. Photograph by 

George R. Swain. Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of 

Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives, Washington, DC.

WhistlerBook.indb 5 WhistlerBook.indb 5 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
6 Palaces of Art

expand Whistler studies beyond traditional art historical boundaries. The contributors 

to these proceedings—academic scholars and museum curators—are all art historians, 

yet they provide a diversity of perspectives and engage an eclectic range of materials and 

methods in exploring Whistler’s place within the varied “art worlds” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

In the opening essay, Ruth Fine speaks eloquently about Whistler as “an intellectual 

and aesthetic muse.” Surveying some thirty years of scholarship, she takes note of the 

many books, articles, catalogues raisonnés, exhibitions, and symposia that have been devoted to Whistler’s artistic output. This effl orescence of Whistler scholarship in the past 

three decades, along with the abundance and availability of related primary documents 

online, has done more than make fundamental resources almost universally accessible: it 

has allowed scholars to focus on analysis, interpretation, and questions of context, moving beyond the monographic and into comparative, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural 

realms. 

Our authors also engage with a wider range of materials and are less concerned 

with distinguishing high art from craft, decoration, and commercial culture than was 

common in the past. Indeed, the ways in which Whistlerian aestheticism overlaps with 

or has been expropriated into these other realms is one of the unifying themes of this 

book. In addition to considering examples from Whistler’s own prodigious output of 

prints, paintings, and drawings, our authors look at jewelry, costume, wallpaper, ceramic tiles, cartoons, greeting cards, and quasi-scientifi c photographs of artists’ hands. 

They explore and reinterpret a number of decorative interiors, including canonical 

Aesthetic spaces such as the Peacock Room, Whistler’s studios, and the Grosvenor 

Gallery, as well as some unexpected ones: transatlantic steamer ships and YMCA rest 

huts for American soldiers. In taking a more inclusive look at Whistler, many of our 

contributors have adopted an interdisciplinary approach, refl ecting more general shifts 

in humanities scholarship in recent decades and suggesting new avenues for further 

inquiry. Literary studies, philosophy, the history of science, theories of management, 

gender studies, and even theories of everyday life come to the fore in many of our authors’ analyses. Twenty-fi rst-century technology, too, is a key element, facilitating much 

of the new research presented here. Margaret MacDonald’s discussion of the Whistler 

Etchings Project, for instance, shows how digital images and online cataloging has simultaneously revivifi ed connoisseurship and expanded audiences. Throughout this book, 

our contributors navigate complex, often interconnected—and occasionally contradictory—aesthetic and art historical fi elds. Yet, despite the diversity of topics, themes, 

and methodologies, the volume is bound by a common desire to situate Whistler within 

a more inclusive narrative of modern art and cultural modernity. Exploring a dense, 

multivalent matrix of art worlds, our authors help clarify nuances of late nineteenthcentury Aesthetic practices and Whistler’s place in the international Aesthetic movement, as well as in the broader worlds of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 

culture.

From Eccentric to Interconnected

Although peripatetic and famously cosmopolitan, Whistler spent most of his professional life in London. As a result, for much of the twentieth century, Whistler studies 

were largely the province of British scholars, and his art was understood primarily as a 

WhistlerBook.indb 6 WhistlerBook.indb 6 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Introduction 7

reaction against the Victorian tendency toward moralizing narrative. Inestimably infl uential to the next generation of painters, interior designers, writers, and collectors on 

both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan, Whistler has nevertheless been diffi cult to place 

in subsequent art historical narratives of modernism. Of course, Whistler insisted on his 

singularity, which he regarded as a sign of originality and authenticity. In the Ten O’Clock

lecture, delivered in 1885, he described the archetypal artist as a “dreamer apart,” his 

world “completely severed” from that of his “fellow-creatures.”9 Victorian critics reinforced this notion, emphasizing what a writer for the London Express called Whistler’s 

“oddities and eccentricities.”10 As Ayako Ono notes in her essay, “Networks of Modernism: A New Look at Whistler in Japan,” the idea of Whistler’s distinctive, unassimilable 

qualities was exported all the way to Japan, where he was emulated by Meiji artists as 

a model of modern Western artistic originality. Even his japonisme was characterized 

there, of all places, as a function of his “eccentricity” rather than an instance of cosmopolitan artistic borrowing. 

This legacy has also affected Whistler’s place within the Aesthetic movement in Britain. Although Whistler has always been an iconic fi gure in discussions of Aestheticism, 

two bodies of discourse—Aestheticism (within which monographic Whistler studies are 

often a subset) and accounts of the Aesthetic movement—have all too frequently been 

considered in isolation, both from each other and from broader art historical narratives. The Aesthetic movement was fundamentally commercial and social in its intent 

and reach, arising as a response to consumer culture by shaping popular taste, creating 

markets for new commodities, and promising to reform and uplift society by making 

beauty accessible. Aestheticism, on the other hand, was an artistic philosophy and 

praxis that grew out of Kantian idealism and asserted the autonomy of art: Art for Art’s 

Sake.11 Although Whistler himself may not have used the phrase “Art for Art’s Sake,” he 

advanced that philosophy through his pictures and writings, in his attempts to control 

the atmosphere and setting in which his art was displayed, and in the fi ery rhetoric of his 

public defense of his artistic method. Consider his pronouncement that art should not 

be encumbered by instructive overlay: “She [Art] is, withal, selfi shly occupied with her 

own perfection only—having no desire to teach—seeking and fi nding the beautiful in all 

conditions and in all times.”12 Art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn reminds us that the term 

Art for Art’s Sake, and the artistic praxis it enunciates, is “tautologous, or intentionally 

meaningless,” serving to underscore “the problem of what art might be if it is not for the 

sake of anything else.”13

The question of content, when art has no ostensible subject and is self-referential, 

is central to modernism, and the perceptual stance that such art requires is one topic 

explored by our authors. Yet the very ideas of retreat and interiority, and the related 

idea of formal harmony (as opposed to moralizing narrative, for example), naturally 

lent themselves to practical applications in the decoration of interiors, both public and 

private. Perhaps this is why “decoration” accrued such a complicated signifi cance in the 

late nineteenth century. On the one hand, it could imply superfi ciality or, even worse, 

a connection to bourgeois consumption and the mundane world of commodity culture: 

Aesthetic decoration was both promoted and parodied in the popular media. On the 

other hand, a parallel discourse posited décor and decoration as forms of artistic expression more authentic than easel painting. Because it was part of a totalizing ensemble, decoration was understood as transcending objecthood—and commodifi cation. 

As Christine Poggi has pointed out, “the term decoration had assumed a nearly mysWhistlerBook.indb 7 WhistlerBook.indb 7 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
8 Palaces of Art

tical signifi cance” for the French Symbolists, who linked decoration to a privileged realm 

of imagination and feeling.14 The Symbolists were infl uenced in this regard by the work 

of Whistler, a connection examined by John Siewert and Anna Gruetzner Robins. Thus, 

as Imogen Hart argues, the ideals of Art for Art’s Sake and the Aesthetic movement 

need not be seen as altogether oppositional. They share concerns about the rhetoric 

and conditions of display as well as a more rarifi ed interest in beauty. As Susan Casteras 

and Julie Codell emphasize, the philosophy of Aestheticism and the Aesthetic movement 

both defi ned themselves through a complicated, often confl icted relationship to popular 

consumer culture.

By expanding and dismantling certain long-standing categories, contributions to 

these proceedings reinforce the idea that Whistler and his colleagues in the Aesthetic 

movement did not create a self-enclosed palace of art, despite their claims to artistic 

autonomy. Howard S. Becker observed in his seminal 1982 study Art Worlds that artists 

are never the “dreamers apart” envisioned by Whistler. Rather, as Becker notes, they 

depend on dealers, collectors, and museum curators 

for exhibition space and fi nancial support; on critics and 

aestheticians for the rationale for what they do; on the state for 

the patronage, or even the adventitious tax laws which persuade 

collectors to buy works and donate them to the public; on 

members of the public to respond to the work emotionally; 

and on other patrons, contemporary and past, who created the 

tradition which makes the backdrop against which their work 

makes sense.15

Our authors reveal that Whistler and his circles functioned within interconnected, often 

transnational webs of associations, described by Melody Barnett Deusner and Ayako 

Ono as “networks”—a term, Deusner points out, that arose from the complex, but increasingly systematized, business structures of the Victorian period. Aesthetic networks 

were constituted by the institutions that exhibited and sold the artists’ work; an art 

market generated by international exhibitions; the proliferation of art criticism and art 

journals; and the new aesthetic, personal, and professional connections emerging from 

the fact of ever-widening travel on the part of both artists and collectors. Such developments tended to blur national boundaries and challenge the idea that artists like Whistler 

were isolates, preoccupied only with aesthetic concerns. 

Paradoxically, as scholars have raised our awareness of Whistler’s many social and 

artistic connections and his cosmopolitan reach, it becomes even more challenging to 

place him securely within any one category or canon. That conundrum is the subject of 

Erica Hirshler’s essay, “Whistler and Art of the Americas,” which addresses one of the 

prevailing issues of this volume, articulated by John Siewert as “an art historical effort 

to place Whistler within Aestheticism and a larger modernist narrative.” For Hirshler, a 

curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the problem was immediate and practical: 

where should the museum put Whistler on the gallery walls? Hirshler describes how, in 

the process of reinstalling the new Art of the Americas wing, Museum of Fine Arts curators made the decision to hang Whistler’s paintings in a gallery devoted to the American 

Aesthetic movement and cosmopolitanism. “The display and its accompanying interpretative materials are designed to open intellectual doors among the arts of the United 

States, England, France, and Japan,” Hirshler says. “Rather than standing apart from the 

art of his time, Whistler serves to bring its disparate strands together.” 

WhistlerBook.indb 8 WhistlerBook.indb 8 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Introduction 9

The Art Worlds of Aestheticism

The essays here are organized according to broad themes intended to call attention 

to these multiplicities and to suggest commonalities and connections as well. The opening essays situate Whistler in the context of the twenty-fi rst century, surveying the state 

of the fi eld, presenting new scholarship supported by new technology, and placing Whistler on the walls of the newly conceptualized museum. The tone of these papers is, perhaps, more personal than we are accustomed to in the world of scholarly writing: Ruth 

Fine goes beyond a review of recent scholarship to refl ect on how and why Whistler has 

been such an enduring source of inspiration for academics and curators. An artist herself 

(as well as a distinguished scholar of modern art), Fine reminds us that even as the fi eld 

of Whistler studies expands, bodies of information grow, and new methodologies fl ourish, the signifi cance of the object and the role of the artist as creator and muse remain 

potent sources of mystery and wonder. On a lighter note, Fine bids adieu to Liquid Paper 

and the ubiquitous index card, acknowledging the development of technological tools 

for the art historian and setting the stage for Margaret MacDonald’s introduction of the 

online etchings catalogue. MacDonald, whose contributions to the fi eld are legendary, 

remains in some ways a traditionalist: having devoted her career to Whistler, she demonstrates the enduring value of specialization and connoisseurship, even while pioneering 

the use of new digital media as a scholarly resource. Her essay speaks to the advantages 

of having such an encyclopedic scholarly resource in an online format. The catalogue 

itself is an extraordinary tool: documenting the production, marketing, printing, exhibition, and collecting of Whistler’s tremendous output of etchings, it provides a new virtual 

network, one that enables scholars to trace the histories of individual etchings from the 

time of their creation to the present day, thereby placing Whistler’s prints in a broader 

and richer context, just as Hirshler does in her account of Whistler in “Whistler and Art 

of the Americas.” 

From Whistler’s place in the twenty-fi rst century, we move to the realm of aesthetic 

subjectivity, the vantage point from which Caroline Arscott, Sally-Anne Huxtable, John 

Siewert, and Anna Gruetzner Robins offer new readings of Whistler’s artistic production. 

In “Subject and Object in Whistler: The Context of Physiological Aesthetics,” Arscott 

looks at Whistler’s Nocturnes through the lens of contemporaneous theories of embodied 

perception, showing how his foggy images of urban darkness might be read as “experimental setups to investigate subjective experience.” Huxtable, drawing on the literature of 

alchemy, spiritualism, and metamorphosis, reinterprets the Peacock Room as the expression of Whistler’s view of the artist as magus, who presides, sorcerer-like, over the self-enclosed space (which in this reading becomes a sort of objective correlative of the aesthetic 

imagination). Subjectivity and interiority are also at the heart of Siewert’s and Robins’s 

essays. Both authors take us into Whistler’s Paris studio, an overdetermined space where 

Whistler both withdrew from the world into a purely aesthetic realm and constructed his 

professional persona for public consumption. This duality, Siewert observes in “Interior 

Motives,” represents a fundamental dynamic in Whistler’s art, in which opposing tendencies are not so much resolved as kept in a state of dynamic tension. His studio in Paris was 

the locus of fruitful interchange with the French Symbolists, as both authors observe. With 

its view of the Luxembourg Gardens and proximity to the museum where the portrait of 

his mother hung, Robins argues, it also carried a more personal meaning for Whistler as a 

place where he could commune with his absent mother and, through the distancing device 

WhistlerBook.indb 9 WhistlerBook.indb 9 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
10 Palaces of Art

of his art, revisit his lonely childhood in evocative lithographs of isolated children and indifferent nannies. 

In the next group of papers, Susan Casteras, Julie Codell, and Imogen Hart look 

at the Aesthetic movement more broadly. Their essays, which do not focus on Whistler, reveal how ideas and objects—especially those related to harmonious decorative 

ensembles—moved fl uidly from one realm into another, accruing new meanings along the 

way. In “Aesthetes on Display,” an exploration of the Aesthetic interior and its denizens, Casteras expands the terrain of the movement to encompass the self-presentation 

of Aesthetes in their drawing rooms and the generally derisive popular responses to 

their self-fashioning. Popular culture is also central to “Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-aBrac,” Codell’s reading of Rossetti’s paintings of the 1860s: rather than rejecting popular 

consumerism, she argues, Rossetti mined its obsession with bric-a-brac in an attempt to 

redefi ne and even “sanctify” it. In “Aestheticism Meets Arts and Crafts,” Hart reads William Morris wallpapers as if they were paintings: their balanced harmonies, she explains, 

have “the potential to suspend the viewer’s consciousness of time passing and to ground 

the viewer in the present moment.” 

The extension of aestheticism into other cultural arenas is also the subject of the 

fi nal essays in this volume by Melody Barnett Deusner, Ayako Ono, and Linda Merrill. 

Deusner’s “Whistler, Aestheticism, and the Networked World” offers a reading of the 

Peacock Room that underscores the “interconnection, organic expansion, and systematic organization” of the Aesthetic interior, comparing it to the business practices of 

its patrons and the “other networked social, technological, and economic systems that 

structured turn-of-the-century English and American life.” Ono’s “Networks of Modernism,” meanwhile, moves beyond the world of Victorian and Gilded Age tycoons to turnof-the-century Japan, where networks of Western and East Asian dealers, collectors, 

writers, and artists are shown to be as complex as the Victorian “reticulations” traced by 

Deusner. Ono’s discussion provides an illuminating counterpoint to Deusner’s analysis of 

the trans-Atlantic exchanges between Whistler and his patrons in Great Britain and the 

United States, demonstrating how the artist, his patrons, and his emulators participated 

in a global cultural network. Fittingly, Linda Merrill’s concluding essay reminds us that 

Tennyson’s “Palace of Art” was “not a simple paean to Art for Art’s Sake, but an urgent 

appeal to the artist to practice social responsibility.” She shows how American artists 

heeded this call to action during World War I, when aestheticist principles were enlisted 

to serve the American military. Walter Pater, whose presence looms large throughout 

this book, described the charms of aestheticism as “an inversion of homesickness ... [an] 

incurable thirst for the sense of escape.”16 In the face of harsher realities, the Whistlerian 

rest huts that Merrill describes were intended to meet that need.

Collectively, these essays stimulate our thinking about the Aesthetic movement as 

a whole and about aestheticist artistic creations as more than self-referential objects of 

beauty. Many questions and issues remain about the unique character, career, and legacy 

of James McNeill Whistler, which the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies will 

continue to explore. Nevertheless, we believe that this publication will make a signifi cant 

contribution to a broader understanding of this artist, his work, the multifaceted art 

worlds in which he functioned, and their collective signifi cance to the way we approach 

works of art in the twenty-fi rst century.

WhistlerBook.indb 10 WhistlerBook.indb 10 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Introduction 11

Notes

 1. For the full text see Alfred Tennyson, “The Palace of Art,” in Poetical Works (London: 

Oxford University Press, 1954), 42–46.

 2. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 11, 29.

 3. Whistler to Leyland, October 31 [1876], GUW 02575. 

 4. The defi nitive account of the room is Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural 

Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

 5. Louise Cort, “All Works of Art Go Together, Part I,” under “Listen: The Peacock 

Room Comes to America,” Smithsonian Institution, accessed May 4, 2013. http://asia.

si.edu/explore/american/peacock/listen.asp. 

 6. See Lee Glazer, The Peacock Room Comes to America (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery 

of Art, 2012), and the related website, “The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, 

and Their Points of Contact,” Smithsonian Institution and Wayne State University 

Libraries, accessed May 4, 2013, http://peacockroom.wayne.edu. 

 7. See David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, 

DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1984), esp. 53–69.

 8. Information on the Lunder Consortium, the symposium, and archived video of the 

talks are available on the Freer and Sackler website: http://asia.si.edu/events/lunderSymposium.asp. 

 9. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 11, 9.

 10. “Whistler v. Ruskin,” London Express, November 30, 1878, quoted in Linda Merrill, 

A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1992), 248.

 11. See, for instance, Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic 

Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996); Elizabeth Prettejohn, 

Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 2007).

 12. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 8.

 13. Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake, 2.

 14. Christine Poggi, In Defi ance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 136. 

 15. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 25th anniversary ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 13. 

 16. Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” in Appreciations with an Essay on Style (London: 

MacMillan, 1889), 213. First published as “Poems by William Morris,” Westminster 

Review 90 (October 1868): 309.

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WhistlerBook.indb 12 WhistlerBook.indb 12 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler in the Art World of the Twenty-First CenturyWhistlerBook.indb 13 WhistlerBook.indb 13 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
The gathering at the Freer Gallery of Art at which these papers were initially presented was sponsored by the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies with the 

purpose of expanding the purview of Whistler studies: considering new research, 

new methodologies, and new connections. Fittingly, the event coincided with the launch 

of the online catalogue raisonné of James McNeill Whistler’s etchings, which brings the 

artist and his work into the brave new world of twenty-fi rst-century technology.1

 It was 

my privilege to introduce the proceedings, in which the speakers included an array of 

distinguished and emerging scholars. My own mission was somewhat more personal than 

theirs: it was to refl ect upon the career of Margaret F. MacDonald, whose work over the 

course of several decades affi rms the power of Whistler as an intellectual and aesthetic 

muse and whose contributions to a radically changing fi eld of art history were likewise 

acknowledged throughout the two-day program. Although my comments touch upon 

Whistler’s art and times, they more centrally refl ect upon issues of change in the wider 

world, as well as the manner in which we conduct our scholarly work. In the course of 

organizing them, I confi rmed the memory of my youthful assumption that anyone who 

had reached retirement age, as Margaret and I both have, would necessarily be engaged 

by refl ection upon the longer past, both as a way of understanding the present and as a 

guide for planning the shorter future. 

One fall Sunday, waiting for a train to New York for a performance by Garth Fagan 

Dance, I was checking my iPhone for e-mail messages. I feel certain that most of you 

share this new lifestyle—without categorical boundaries and shored up by memories 

of relaxing weekends that no longer exist because our magical smartphones constantly 

divert us to the demands of the offi ce. This Garth Fagan Sunday followed the passing of 

Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple, who is considered among the great pioneers of the 

personal computer revolution. I had been riveted by the obituaries and tributes to that 

legend of an aesthetically driven, technological world. It was thanks to Jobs that I could be 

reading my offi ce e-mail so easily, midpoint in the Columbus Day holiday weekend. 

Memories from my youth don’t include computers or e-mail. Astonishing as it 

seems, the earliest of them don’t include television, either. Horse-drawn-carriage 

deliveries of milk in glass bottles were part of my world, and that milkman’s work 

companion was my city girl’s introduction to the existence outside the zoo of fourlegged animals larger than dogs. An itinerant knife sharpener made monthly visits to 

the alley behind my childhood home, hawking his skills for what today would be barely 

a pittance. These memories sound like descriptions of the nineteenth-century tradespeople who might have been depicted by Whistler and his contemporaries, rather than 

The Artist as Muse

Ruth Fine

WhistlerBook.indb 15 WhistlerBook.indb 15 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
16 Palaces of Art

experiences of someone living in the second decade of the twenty-fi rst century. How 

quickly time does pass. 

My early research notes were written on three-by-fi ve-inch fi le cards, which were 

later assembled into what I trusted would be a coherent structure that followed an outline, handwritten on a yellow legal pad, layers of graphite, written, erased, and rewritten. 

The resulting essay was likewise initiated on those blue-lined yellow sheets, a stack of 

which would be cut and taped so that the text was further rearranged, eventually arriving 

at a semblance of order for typing in fi nal form. Liquid Paper permitted last-minute 

changes and corrections. It now seems quite remarkable that anything ever actually 

reached publication. How different was the work on this text: carried back and forth on 

one portable fl ash drive to three computers in two cities and along Amtrak’s Northeast 

Corridor. 

But to return to that Sunday e-mail check. One message arrived via an American art 

listserv from someone I have never met but from whom I receive more messages than I 

do from most of my closest friends. It called attention to a striking image on the website 

Ephemera Studies (ephemerastudies.org) of two handsomely dressed, beautifully coiffed 

women working in a garish, red-light-illuminated darkroom. The image graced the cover 

of a 1918 (therefore wartime) catalogue of offerings from the David Stern Company on 

Madison Street in Chicago.2

 One of my National Gallery associates’ reading of the motif 

is that it champions photography as something so easy to do, even a woman could be 

successful at it. Above the illustration, items for sale were listed: “Cameras—Lenses / 

Kodaks—Supplies.” A cursory online search into Kodaks, produced by the company that 

revolutionized the use of handheld cameras, led me to learn that from 1928 (a decade 

later than the catalogue) to 1933, “Kodak made several colored and deco-styled cameras 

that were designed to appeal specifi cally to the style-conscious women of the twenties,” 

confi rming my colleague’s take on the cover subject.3

That dramatic red-and-black illustration of female workers from the second decade 

of the last century reinforces our growing understanding of the existence of multiple art 

histories, in particular the advances that have been made in giving fame to women artists, 

following Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking article on the subject in 1971.4 That was one 

year before my own studio-based and teaching practice shifted to the curatorial work 

that has dominated the subsequent four decades. Yet the motif also highlights how much 

remains to be learned about the role of women in art. 

As our fi eld evolves, the ability to uncover and navigate this diverse and complex material owes much to the environment Steve Jobs helped to create; it puts us in touch with 

more information than we ever could have imagined possible even a decade ago. Within 

this new circumstance, confl icting positions need equally to be considered as essential to 

grasping an expanding and shifting puzzle of the past. Mark Rothko alluded to the notion 

of several art histories some seventy years ago in his manuscript for The Artist’s Reality, 

recently edited by his son, Christopher.5 One eventually realizes that every artist develops 

a unique art history, selecting from myriad options only those that will nourish his or her 

vision. 

The 2011 symposium “Palaces of Art” took place in Washington, DC, where—as is 

also true for Glasgow—Whistler’s presence is always cause for celebration. These are 

sister cities in the sense that they are essential to the study of this master. Amsterdam, 

London, Paris, and Venice are among others in the Whistlerian mix. (One suspects that 

the Venice period is so fully mined because proper study of the work requires repeated 

WhistlerBook.indb 16 WhistlerBook.indb 16 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
The Artist as Muse 17

trips to that romantic city of canals: How much does one read about Whistler and Liverpool?) But if it is Whistler’s art itself that concerns us—the subtleties of its making, the 

nature of the artist’s process, the experience of viewing original objects, rather than the 

sources for its motifs—then the Washington region is essential. In addition to the extraordinary Peacock Room, more than 1,200 of Whistler’s works are housed at the Freer 

Gallery of Art, including approximately 300 paintings, watercolors, and drawings. There 

are more than 600 works at the National Gallery of Art, and more than 300 at both 

the Library of Congress and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Whistler is also well represented in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, the 

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 

and the Georgetown University Library. In total, we have ready access in Washington 

to more than 3,000 of Whistler’s works of art, to say nothing of his autograph letters 

and other primary-source materials likewise housed in local institutions. This immense 

bounty is owed to Charles Lang Freer, George Lucas, and Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, 

among other devoted collectors and donors such as the Lunders, and including Lessing J. 

Rosenwald, whose collection spurred my own passion for Whistler.6

In May 1984, a Whistler symposium, about which I will say more later, was cosponsored by the National Gallery’s Center for Advanced Study in the History of Art and the 

Freer Gallery. At its close, several friends, including Margaret MacDonald and Katharine 

Lochnan, relaxed at my apartment, located across from a large vacant lot that has since 

come to house the gigantic Pentagon City mall (another refl ection upon change). The 

highlight of that evening was sharing a bottle of champagne to celebrate Margaret’s, Katharine’s, and my commitment to moving forward with a revision to Edward G. Kennedy’s 

landmark catalogue of 1910, The Etched Work of Whistler. Surely it was time. Katharine’s 

groundbreaking text The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler had recently been published, 

as had my more modest catalogue documenting the Whistler etchings assembled by 

Anita and Julius Zelman, a collection that is now at the Los Angeles County Museum of 

Art. Margaret, as usual, was immersed in several Whistler-related projects. In regard to 

the etchings specifi cally, she had been responsible for multiple exhibitions, including Whistler: The Graphic Work: Amsterdam, Liverpool, London, Venice of 1976, a circulating show 

with loans from the Rosenwald Collection, which had precipitated our initial meeting.7

Despite the 1984 champagne toasts and much good will, that Kennedy revision has 

been long in coming. Katharine Lochnan and I have moved in other directions, although 

she has remained more fully engaged with Whistler’s period than I have. One thinks of 

her splendid exhibition Turner, Whistler, Monet, as well as her work on William Morris 

and his circle, printmaking in nineteenth-century France, and various studies of works in 

Toronto collections.8

 Her breadth (in contrast to Margaret’s focus) confi rms that one important difference between museum-based and academic-based art history seems to be 

that we in museums necessarily respond to diverse institutional needs as well as topics 

that arise from a specifi cally personal calling. 

My own work has taken me to Georgia O’Keeffe and to John Marin, who, especially in 

his early pastels and etchings, was profoundly infl uenced by Whistler. Particularly important to me has been research on several African American artists of post-World War II 

generations, among them Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Washington-based Sam 

Gilliam.9

 This work has brought home to me the complexity of our multiple art histories, which seem rarely to intersect. I was pleased to learn from proofs of Henry Ossawa 

Tanner: Modern Spirit, the catalogue edited by Anna Marley for the Pennsylvania Academy 

WhistlerBook.indb 17 WhistlerBook.indb 17 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
18 Palaces of Art

of the Fine Arts’ exhibition, about signifi cant new research linking Tanner to Whistler in 

a variety of contexts.10 Curators, too, develop their individual art histories. 

Of we three 1984 champagne-sipping celebrants, Margaret, alone, has remained 

focused on Whistler and his time. Although a few other artists’ names and the subject 

of photography appear in her bio, Whistler has been her lifelong muse. He has served 

her well, as she has him. The odyssey began when the young painter Margaret MacInnes 

was teaching children and working toward an art teacher’s diploma. Responding to an 

advertisement seeking a research assistant for Andrew McLaren Young at the University 

of Glasgow, she read Denys Sutton’s Nocturne to bone up before her interview. Obviously, she got the job and was renewed on an annual basis for many years. For the fi rst 

three of them she was cataloging press cuttings and, as she put it, about to go “daft.” 

But meeting Norman MacDonald had suggested that it would be a good idea to stay in 

Glasgow, rather than to seek a teaching job elsewhere. MacInnes decided, she said, “to 

fi nd something I liked to do and started looking at the watercolours; and then I saw Mrs. 

Leyland at the Frick and thought hey, Whistler’s really good—that was a mind-boggling 

moment.”11 She continued looking at the watercolors and also came to love the etchings, 

leading to a tiny show of them that she mounted in the Glasgow University print room, 

with a xeroxed catalogue, in 1971.12 The rest, as they say, is history. 

In exhibition catalogues, articles, and reviews, Margaret (by now MacDonald) has 

addressed Whistler and Holland; Whistler and Russia; Whistler in Venice; Whistler and 

Stéphane Mallarmé; Whistler’s Notes, Harmonies, Nocturnes; Whistler’s last years in Algiers and Corsica; Whistler’s designs for a catalogue of blue-and-white nankin porcelain; 

Whistler’s correspondence with Théodore Duret; Whistler’s lithographs; Whistler and 

music; Whistler, women, and fashion; that iconic American painting of Whistler’s mother; 

and the work of Beatrice, Whistler’s wife.13

Major collaborative publications include the catalogue of Whistler’s paintings that 

Margaret, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles completed after the passing of Andrew 

McLaren Young and, in collaboration with Nigel Thorp and Patricia de Montfort, the 

extraordinary online Whistler correspondence project, sponsored by the now-closed 

Centre for Whistler Studies at the University of Glasgow. Margaret has also given us 

the comprehensive study of Whistler’s drawings, pastels, and watercolors, in which she 

made the radical decision to include as drawings those prints on which Whistler made 

additions by hand.14 Such hybrid sheets are generally referred to as “touched proofs,” 

and in Whistler’s case, they relate to an aspect of his process as a painter—the drawn 

and painted details he added to sequential photographs of canvases taken as he refi ned 

the compositions. An updated catalogue of the drawings and pastels might consider the 

inclusion of those working photographs, as well. Such a move would comfortably fi t into 

the contemporary practice of breaking down and reconfi guring categories. 

Among my favorite curatorial memories are transatlantic conversations with Margaret as she worked her way through Anna Matilda Whistler’s abbreviated recipes, testing 

every one for an edited version of Whistler’s Mother’s Cook Book. Her intention was to 

create “a tried and tested adaptation for the modern cook.” As if yesterday, I can hear 

Margaret’s plaintive cry: “Ruth, please—what is the texture of a proper muffi n?” My recollection is that she had to make several versions en route to an acceptable fi nal product. 

Mrs. Whistler’s recipe for muffi ns comes between those for caraway buns and waffl es, 

both of which call for what is now a rather obscure ingredient called “pearl ash.” In her 

edited version, Margaret’s explanatory notes inform the reader that pearl ash, a form 

WhistlerBook.indb 18 WhistlerBook.indb 18 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
The Artist as Muse 19

of potassium carbonate, “was discovered in America in the 1790s and used until baking 

powder was produced in the 1850s.” Such is Dr. MacDonald’s detail-oriented approach 

to all things Whistlerian.15

Removing Whistler’s Mother’s Cook Book from the shelf recently, I found tucked into 

it an airmail letter in Margaret’s unmistakable hand, written on a folded blue aerogram 

postmarked June 9, 1980. The date is a marker in my own life, less than a month before 

we completed the transfer of Lessing Rosenwald’s collection from suburban Philadelphia to Washington and the start of my Washington years as well, which are now in the 

process of coming to a close. The letter mentions reviews of the cookbook that I had 

collected and sent to her, and it reports the recent birth of Margaret and Norman’s 

daughter Helen, a baby sister for three-year-old Kathy. This is not irrelevant to the 

Whistler story because the entire MacDonald family has at one time or another been 

duly involved with Margaret’s Whistler-directed endeavors. Norman MacDonald recently 

wrote an introduction to Connecting Whistler, an online festschrift in Margaret’s honor. 

His piece, “Forty Years with Margaret and Jimmy,” slyly makes clear how much appreciation we owe to all of the MacDonalds, but most especially to Norman, whose keen curiosity and intelligence, honed within the fi eld of theoretical physics, has been strategically 

applied to Whistler research as well. The seventeen other essays gathered in Connecting 

Whistler are a vivid testament to the generosity and inspiration that Margaret’s students 

and colleagues have enjoyed as they followed her path. They are also a testament to the 

richness of Whistler’s art, its capacity to sustain an ever-growing legion of scholars who 

have embraced and been embraced by this muse.16

The MacDonald family’s tenacity is now applied to the etchings—490 of them. One 

etching is listed in twenty-one states, and twenty-two are listed in ten or more states, 

including nine that are documented in fi fteen. No wonder it has taken a quarter of a century for this catalogue to be launched. Launched rather than published—not a descriptor 

that Kathy, Margaret, or I would have used in our 1984 conversation, which was about 

a book. It is useful to remember that initial discussions of an online version of that book 

project occurred almost a decade ago, placing it at the early cutting edge of this relatively 

new scholarly format. Wouldn’t Whistler have been pleased to be at the head of the 

pack?

Katharine Lochnan and I remain involved in the Whistler Etchings Project as advisers, along with Peter Black, Lee Glazer, Anne Gow, Martin Hopkinson, Anna Gruetzner 

Robins, and Martha Tedeschi. The active catalogue team itself includes Margaret Hausberg (to whom I am grateful for information included here, as I am to Lee Glazer and 

Linda Merrill), Joanna Meacock, and Grischka Petri. Others involved are listed on the 

project website, including Norman and Helen MacDonald (as honorary fellow and junior 

assistant, respectively). Everyone has brought his or her individual expertise to the close 

study of often miniscule state differences and the development of the international print 

market during Whistler’s period, as well as research into every detail of the artist’s life 

that might tell us something about the etchings: his associates, his travels, and so forth. 

Because the etchings essentially parallel the whole of Whistler’s career, it is diffi cult to 

imagine anything in his experience that isn’t somehow related to them. 

I have always assumed that a close look at the state differences among Whistler’s 

etchings would be as demanding a task as any in a print catalogue undertaking. A personal encounter somewhat bears this out. In 1987, out of the blue, we received a letter 

in which the National Gallery was listed as one of fi ve institutions being offered the opWhistlerBook.indb 19 WhistlerBook.indb 19 9/9/13 2:3

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20 Palaces of Art

portunity to acquire a selection of prints from an estate. Neither the writer nor the deceased had a previous relationship with the National Gallery, except perhaps as a visitor 

(a connection, incidentally, that has been the origin of several bequests). This 1987 letter 

led to the gift of 122 works: a group of European and British prints by Charles Meryon, 

Thomas Rowlandson, and others; lithographs from the 1930s and 1940s by a variety of 

American regionalists, such as Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry; and a selection of etchings by Whistler. If identifi ed by their Kennedy numbers alone, impressions of 

the Whistler etchings were already owned by the National Gallery. But there were many 

other factors to consider. The executor knew nothing about the nuances of print connoisseurship, but she was bright and receptive, and when introduced to the importance 

of differences in state, ink color, printing technique, and paper, she eagerly sent the etchings to Washington for comparison with impressions in the National Gallery’s collection, 

permitting us to carefully determine which of the Whistlers to request from the estate. 

As it turned out, seventeen of the twenty on offer presented new variants of subjects 

previously represented, so their acquisition made important comparative additions to the 

National Gallery’s representation of Whistler’s prints.17

Although one often frames the discussion of variant print impressions in terms of 

technique, the more important point is content. The emotional and formal statements 

Whistler was making were radically altered by these printing differences, which may be 

discerned only through closely looking beyond basic imagery. Within Whistler’s printed 

oeuvre these possibilities are quite expansive—not only with the etchings but also with 

the lithographs, in his concern with variant color compositions and altered lithotint grisailles. Whistler’s etchings and lithographs place him in a category with few practitioners, 

among them Rembrandt, Whistler’s spiritual father; Francisco de Goya; Mary Cassatt; 

and in our own time, Jasper Johns. For each of these artists, making prints played, or 

plays, so central a role that any serious study of these artists’ work must include them. 

Changes to research methodologies, to the contextual frame, have grown to include 

extensive interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches. Likewise, changes to how we 

share our fi ndings have made radical shifts to the work experience. How antiquated it 

can appear to start from a group of objects and a consideration of how they are made, 

rather than from an intellectual premise that links them. Yet objects themselves can, and 

do, still function as an essential reason for an immersion in art. For me, this has most frequently engaged prints and drawings and the rich data they reveal about artistic process. 

This may be seen in the Freer Gallery’s exhibition of Whistler’s interiors, Sweet Silent 

Thought: Whistler’s Interiors, which Lee Glazer and Maya Foo mounted to coincide with 

the Lunder symposium.18

Leonard Barkan, speaking recently at the National Gallery about his new book, 

Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, suggested that the range of his own research, which has 

focused on both the written word and the drawn image, could be understood as resulting from either an interdisciplinary approach or a short attention span—said, of 

course, with a smile.19 The dichotomy of these possibilities and Barkan’s comments about 

reciprocal connections within his work hit close to home. My own shifts have taken me 

from the Rosenwald Collection and the art of William Blake in the 1970s to simultaneous 

exhibitions of Whistler’s etchings and of prints and sculpture from the contemporary 

publishing workshop Gemini G.E.L. in the 1980s to O’Keeffe, Roy Lichtenstein, and 

Helen Frankenthaler in the 1990s to Mel Bochner and the collection of Dorothy and 

Herbert Vogel in the 2000s and to Rothko, Norman Lewis, and other abstract expresWhistlerBook.indb 20 WhistlerBook.indb 20 9/9/13 2:3

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The Artist as Muse 21

sionists, into the present.20 With all of these shifts, drawings and prints have been central 

to my understanding of art. Drawings offer the sites where ideas originate and develop, 

often intersecting with painting, sculpture, installation, and various performance-based 

strategies. With prints, state, trial, and working proofs likewise provide clues to artistic 

intention as it evolves. 

In addition to new scholarship available through online catalogues raisonnés, the 

Internet has fostered diverse collegial communication in the form of interactive symposia and international webinars, making us aware, more than ever before, of research 

that is taking place around the world. Our growing concern with Latin American art, for 

example, was recently featured in the Sunday New York Times.

21 And in the fall of 2011, 

the Terra Foundation, whose goal is to make American art better known around the 

globe, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum cosponsored a symposium focused on 

artistic exchange between the United States and Latin America. In the print fi eld alone, 

two of the presentations brought to light mid-twentieth-century connections between 

the two regions of which I, for one, was unaware. Thus, although the cultural interchange 

itself is hardly new, our attention to this history is expanding exponentially.22

Similar change is evident in Whistler scholarship when comparing the papers 

presented at the 1984 symposium with what is included here.23 Twenty-fi ve years ago, 

Margaret focused on one of Whistler’s muses, Maud Franklin, offering new biographical 

data about both artist and model to extend our understanding of Whistler as a portraitist. Katharine Lochnan expanded on her Etchings of James McNeill Whistler text, calling 

attention to an unpublished portfolio by Whistler and Francis Seymour Haden, “The 

Thames from Its Source to the Sea.” On top of organizing, installing, and writing for 

the exhibition that had just opened at the Freer, David Park Curry looked at Whistler 

as an exhibition designer extraordinaire in “Total Control.”24 Nigel Thorp spoke about 

Whistler’s reworked photographs housed in Glasgow. (His presentation called to mind 

another aspect of Whistler and photography, one that Robert Getscher mentions in 

his 1977 exhibition catalogue, The Stamp of Whistler. The initial concept for the show 

included a study of Whistler’s infl uence on photography, but time and funding constraints 

eliminated that section, leaving attention solely on Whistler’s infl uence on subsequent 

printmaking.)25 Robin Spencer discussed “Whistler, Manet, and the Tradition of the 

Avant-Garde,” presenting the paper that now appears the most prescient of the broad 

frame that Whistler studies, and art history in general, would come to take, as seen, for 

example, in Lochnan’s Whistler, Turner, Monet and Marc Simpson’s Like Breath on Glass: 

Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly.

26

Whistler’s internationalism, in his travels and in his interests and infl uences, is an 

aspect of current scholarship that keeps him vividly alive for us today. That the contributors to this volume of proceedings are more internationally based than in 1984, more 

multigenerational, and from both academic and exhibiting institutions holds much promise for enriching our understanding of Whistler’s art and its contexts. Additionally, the 

umbrella title for the symposium that preceded this book—Palaces of Art: Whistler and 

the Art Worlds of Aestheticism—called for subjects that are necessarily more contextually 

based than we aimed for in 1984. Whistler’s name does not even appear in the titles for 

fi ve of the essays.

It is especially fi tting that one area of focus is the Peacock Room. The Freer Gallery 

of Art’s reinstallation of that room (by Lee Glazer) in the spring of 2011 has brilliantly 

given another life to this extraordinary space we have long admired. In this iteration, it 

WhistlerBook.indb 21 WhistlerBook.indb 21 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
22 Palaces of Art

conforms more closely to Charles Lang Freer’s pleasure.27 How differently it is experienced now, with the gilded shelves gloriously enhanced by earthy objects from China, 

Korea, Japan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, rather than as previously fi lled with blue-and-white 

porcelain. Such a fascinating curatorial project causes one to refl ect upon the purposes 

and functions of the work that we do as curators, art historians, students of culture, 

history, philosophy, aesthetic theory, and artists. What paths of learning and practice 

guide our lives? Accepting the wonders of modern technology, such as the possibility of 

reaching museum collections and library stacks around the globe online, the concern increases that the tangible sensations of touching paper, turning pages, eyeballing canvases 

to compare the effects of different types, weights, and weaves, or examining the different 

patinas in multiple works from a sculpture edition can become increasingly foreign. Yet it 

is impossible, without seeing the physical works, to discuss the implication of Gauguin’s 

use of burlap rather than linen in certain of his paintings or to discern the different light 

effects across multiple casts of Matisse’s bronzes with varying fi nishes. 

As one of the older people published in this volume, my fear is that the younger 

of them, as well as the wider art audience, may not experience these pleasures and 

thus may move forward in their work, and in their approach to understanding art, with 

neither a feeling of loss nor an awareness that another way is possible. This track has 

brought Margaret F. MacDonald to embrace the potential of technology yet remain fi rmly 

rooted in vital, if old-fashioned, matters of connoisseurship—scholarship that moves 

from the object outward, rather than from a theoretical position to the work of art 

itself. I remember a parallel concern, in the early 1970s, of a sculptor friend who taught 

at one of this country’s major art schools—that the institution might have graduated the 

very fi rst class that didn’t know how to make things, only how to conceive them. 

When I was working in Los Angeles on those exhibitions of Whistler etchings and 

the Gemini workshop, I stayed in a Santa Monica hotel named Shangri La, then an aging 

Art Deco landmark. One of the private amusements of staying there was that anyone 

who telephoned was greeted with “Hello, this is Shangri La”—a personal memory of 

Symbolist meaning that touches upon one of our program’s themes. I had breakfast daily 

at an outdoor café and became addicted to the Los Angeles Times Westside real estate 

pages, with their over-the-top descriptions of solid-gold bathroom faucets. These pages 

have since been supplanted in my life by the New York Times Sunday Styles section, in 

which often frivolous announcements and articles are likewise laden with amusing details. 

One from June 2011, “Portals to Power,” had as its subject the Core Club, a private 

Manhattan establishment open to all who could afford its initiation fee of $50,000 and 

annual dues of $15,000. The article quoted an earlier Times piece that described the club 

as a place where “a geographically and socially diverse set of wealthy people might ‘gather 

and meet others of the same disparate tribe’” and where, “as in seemingly all places frequented by the new rich, art is a central Core club theme.” Alexander Calder and Andy 

Warhol were named among the artists whose work contributed to the decor.28 Although 

the subject of Art and Money is embedded in any discussion of the Peacock Room, this 

Core Club intermingling seems more emphatic than I remember from my own early 

experience. 

Another section of that June issue of the New York Times featured an article by the 

cartoonist and essayist Tim Kreider, who recalled his discovery, as a seventeen-year-old 

in the 1980s, of the composer Harry Partch, whose music was on the B side of an album 

by John Cage that he had borrowed from the library. Kreider had never heard of Partch, 

WhistlerBook.indb 22 WhistlerBook.indb 22 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
The Artist as Muse 23

whose music he described as “unearthly, yowling strings, metallic twangs, rippling liquid 

percussion” emanating from instruments he was unable to identify. The teenager shared 

the record with the sole friend he had who liked classical music and so kept him from 

feeling “eccentric and freakish and alone.” Kreider lamented that he had been unable to 

learn much about Partch at the time, suggesting how different it would be today. “That’s 

what the Internet is for, yes?” he inquired of the reader. 

But Kreider went on to note a downside, suggesting that adolescents “secretly like 

feeling eccentric and freakish and alone ... and cultivating ever-dweebier erudition.” He 

recounted that the singer-songwriter Kurt Cobain once said that long before he actually heard punk rock, he had imagined what the music would sound like on the basis of 

magazine images of the musicians who played it. Kreider also pointed to the importance 

of having one’s imagination challenged, lamenting that having “instant accessibility leaves 

us oddly disappointed, bored, endlessly craving more.” So I want to close by echoing the 

haunting hope of Tim Kreider, an artist and a writer, on behalf of legions of dweebie seventeen-year-old kids who are living a century after Whistler: the hope that we continue 

to sustain ways “to transform mere ignorance into mystery, simple not knowing into 

wonder.” 29

Notes

 1. Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James 

McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a Catalogue Raisonné (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 

2011), http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk.

 2. “Women and Photography 1918,” Ephemera Studies, curated by Saul Zalesch, 2009, 

http://ephemerastudies.org/category/gallery/catalog/page/2/. Accessed May 7, 2013. 

 3. Remy Steller, “Walter Dorwin Teague: Brownie Cameras,” on the Remigijus Brownie 

Collection website, http://www.browniecamera.nl/walter_dorwin_teague.htm. Accessed May 7, 2013. 

 4. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, 

and Power and Other Essays (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 145–78.

 5. Mark Rothko, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, ed. Christopher Rothko (New 

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).

 6. On the Rosenwald Collection, see Elizabeth Mongan, Selections from the Rosenwald 

Collection (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1943); Ruth E. Fine, “Drawings in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection,” Drawing 4, no. 3 (September–October 

1982): 49–55; Ruth E. Fine, Lessing J. Rosenwald: Tribute to a Collector (Washington, 

DC: National Gallery of Art, 1982).

 7. Edward G. Kennedy, The Etched Work of Whistler (New York: Grolier Club, 1910); 

Katharine A. Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven, CT: Yale 

University Press in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, 1984); Ruth E. Fine, 

Drawing Near: Whistler Etchings from the Zelman Collection (Los Angeles: Los Angeles 

County Museum of Art, 1984); Margaret F. MacDonald, Whistler: The Graphic Work: 

Amsterdam, Liverpool, London, Venice (London: Thomas Agnew and Sons, 1976).

 8. Katharine A. Lochnan, ed., Turner, Whistler, Monet (London: Tate Publishing in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2004). Other publications by Lochnan include 

The Earthly Paradise: Arts and Crafts by William Morris and His Circle from Canadian 

Collections, edited with Douglas E. Schoenherr and Carole Silver (Toronto: Key PorWhistlerBook.indb 23 WhistlerBook.indb 23 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
24 Palaces of Art

ter Books, 1993); Printmaking in Nineteenth-Century France: The Touche Ross Gift to the 

Art Gallery of Ontario, with Brenda Rix (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1988); and 

Fifty Years: The Canadian Society of Painters in Water Colour, 1925–1975 (Toronto: Art 

Gallery of Ontario, 1975).

 9. See, for example, Ruth E. Fine and Barbara Buhler Lynes, O’Keeffe on Paper, with 

Elizabeth Glassman and Judith C. Walsh (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 

2000); John Marin (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1990); Art of Romare 

Bearden, with Mary Lee Corlett et al. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 

2003); Romare Bearden, American Modernist, edited with Jacqueline Frances (Washington DC: National Gallery, 2011); Sam Gilliam: Prints (Washington, DC: George 

Washington University, Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, 2006).

 10. Anna O. Marley, ed., Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit (Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 2012).

 11. Margaret MacDonald, e-mail to the author, June 19, 2011.

 12. Margaret F. MacDonald, Whistler in Venice: Etchings, Drypoints and Pastels (Glasgow: 

Department of Fine Art, University of Glasgow, 1971).

 13. Margaret F. MacDonald, Whistler and Holland, with Jan F. Heijbroek (Zwolle, Netherlands: Waanders, 1977); Whistler and Russia, with Galine Andreeva (Moscow: 

Scanrus, 2006); “Whistler’s View of Venice,” in James McNeill Whistler: The Venetian 

Etchings (London: Art Partnerships International, 2001); Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Whistler and Mallarmé

(Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1973); Notes, Harmonies, Nocturnes (New York: M. 

Knoedler, 1984); “Whistler’s Last Years: Spring 1901—Algiers and Corsica,” Gazette 

des Beaux-Arts 73 (1969): 323–42; “Whistler’s Designs for a Catalogue of Blue and 

White Nankin Porcelain,” Connoisseur 198 (1978): 290–95; “Correspondence Duret–

Whistler,” with Joy Newton, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 110 (1987): 150–64; “Whistler’s 

Lithographs,” Print Quarterly 5 (1988): 20–55; Whistler and Music: Venezia (Valencia: 

Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, 2005); Whistler, Women, and Fashion, with Susan 

Grace Galassi, Aileen Ribeiro, and Patricia de Montfort (New York: Frick Collection, 

2003); Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon (Aldershot, UK: Lund Humphries, 2003); 

Beatrice Whistler: Artist and Designer (Glasgow: Hunterian Art Gallery, 1997).

 14. Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles, 

The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980); 

The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855–1903, ed. Margaret F. MacDonald, 

Patricia de Montfort, and Nigel Thorp, including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855–1880, ed. Georgia Toutziari, online ed. (Glasgow: University of 

Glasgow, 2003–2010), http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence; Margaret 

F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler: Drawings, Pastels, and Watercolours; A Catalogue 

Raisonné (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995).

 15. Margaret MacDonald, Whistler’s Mother’s Cook Book (London: Elek, 1979), 53, 55.

 16. Emma Hermens, Joanna Meacock, and Grischka Petri, eds., Connecting Whistler: Festschrift for Margaret F. MacDonald (Glasgow: University of Glasgow School of Culture 

and Creative Arts, 2010), http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/cca/research/instituteofarthistory/publications/connectingwhistlerfestschriftforprofmacdonald/.

 17. Gifts from the estate of John Nichols Estabrook were accessioned in 1987 and 1988.

WhistlerBook.indb 24 WhistlerBook.indb 24 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
The Artist as Muse 25

 18. An overview of Sweet Silent Thought: Whistler’s Interiors (August 20, 2011, through 

summer 2012) is available at http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/sweetSilent

Thought.asp.

 19. Leonard Barkan, “Some Pages from Michelangelo’s Life” (lecture, National Gallery of 

Art, Washington, DC, October 16, 2011).

 20. Ruth E. Fine, Gemini G.E.L.: Art and Collaboration (Washington, DC: National Gallery 

of Art in association with Abbeville, 1984); The Prints of Roy Lichtenstein: A Catalogue 

Raisonné, 1948–1993, with Mary Lee Corlett (Washington, DC: National Gallery of 

Art, 1994); Helen Frankenthaler: Prints (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art in 

association with Abrams, 1993); Mel Bochner: Drawing from Four Decades (New York: 

Fifth Floor Foundation, 2006); From Minimal to Conceptual Art: Works from the Dorothy 

and Herbert Vogel Collection, with essay by John T. Paoletti (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1994).

 21. “Latin American Art, Rediscovered Again,” New York Times, October 23, 2011.

 22. “Encuentros: Artistic Exchange between the US and Latin America,” Smithsonian 

American Art Museum, Washington, DC, October 5–6, 2011. An archived webcast 

of the symposium is at http://americanart.si.edu/research/symposia/2011/webcast/

index.cfm.

 23. The symposium proceedings were published in James McNeill Whistler: A Reexamination, ed. Ruth E. Fine, Studies in the History of Art 19 (Washington, DC: National 

Gallery of Art, 1987).

 24. David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: 

Freer Gallery of Art in association with Norton, 1984).

 25. Robert H. Getscher, The Stamp of Whistler (Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 1977). On Whistler and photography, see Lilly Koltun, “Whistler as Model: The 

Enacted Biographies of Pictorialist Photographers,” in James McNeill Whistler in Context: Essays from the Whistler Centenary Symposium, University of Glasgow, 2003, ed. Lee 

Glazer, Margaret F. MacDonald, Linda Merrill, and Nigel Thorp, Freer Gallery of Art 

Occasional Papers, n.s., 2 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2008), 65–80; 

Sarah Elizabeth Kelly, “Camera’s Lens and Mind’s Eye: James McNeill Whistler and 

the Science of Art” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010). 

 26. Marc Simpson, ed., Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly 

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).

 27. The installation opened on April 19, 2011. See Lee Glazer, The Peacock Room Comes 

to America (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 2012).

 28. Guy Trebay, “Portals to Power,” New York Times, June 19, 2011.

 29. Tim Kreider, “In Praise of Not Knowing,” New York Times, June 19, 2011. 

WhistlerBook.indb 25 WhistlerBook.indb 25 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler’s biographers Elizabeth R. and Joseph Pennell record a charming, and 

possibly even true, story. Whistler heard a group of ladies praising Frederic 

Leighton: “He is such a wonderful musician! ... such a brilliant orator! such 

a dignifi ed President! such a charming host! such an amazing linguist!” To which Whistler 

remarked, “H’m, paints, too, don’t he, among his other accomplishments?”1 Descriptions 

and discussions of Whistler as an aesthete, theorist, and writer, or as a fi gure in society, 

a dandy and a wit, can contribute valuable insights but only partial truths, which are part 

of a complex whole. A very important part of Whistler’s oeuvre—and that for which he 

was most admired in his lifetime—was his work in etching and drypoint. 

Whistler died in 1903, and accounts of his life were published from that date on. 

Surveys of his etchings were published even earlier—the fi rst catalogue was written 

by Ralph Thomas in 1874, followed by Frederick Wedmore’s two volumes in 1886 and 

1889.2 Wedmore admitted to Whistler,

I began making it [the catalogue] for my own use since I have 

taken not only to extremely enjoy but to live with a good 

many of your Etchings. ... But owing to the great number of 

the Etchings, I have found it more laborious than I expected. 

... I do it rather en amateur. ... Now that I know your 

Etchings, I feel their quality very fully. The best will live with 

the best of Rembrandt’s.3

Unfortunately, Whistler’s reply is not recorded, but he does not seem to have 

actively opposed Wedmore’s work, and indeed, his wife, Beatrice, used it when trying 

to impose order on the stacks of unsold prints in the studio in the 1890s. Writing a 

catalogue raisonné is, as Wedmore confessed, “laborious,” and incomplete catalogues 

by Joseph Pennell and Joseph W. Revillon are to be found in the archives in Washington, 

DC, and Glasgow.4

Wedmore’s catalogue of the etchings was followed by two substantial catalogues, 

one by Howard Mansfi eld in 1909 and, above all, Edward G. Kennedy’s fully illustrated catalogue in 1910.5

 All these cataloguers had met Whistler, and their works 

contributed basic information and useful insights, but none were complete, and 

sometimes they were misleading. Even Kennedy, whose catalogue is most frequently 

consulted, listed a small etching as “Market, Calais,” although admitting that “this title is quite an arbitrary one which I gave to this subject some years ago in London to 

differentiate it from similar subjects, all of which, most likely, were done at the same 

The Whistler Etchings Project

Margaret F. MacDonald

WhistlerBook.indb 27 WhistlerBook.indb 27 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
28 Palaces of Art 

time.”6 It has now been identifi ed as Market Place, Ostend (G.350). 

A catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s oil paintings was published in 1980, and in 1995, 

my catalogue of Whistler’s drawings, watercolors, and pastels was published. This was 

followed by the catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s lithographs published by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998.7

 Since then, major online publications have been added, drawing 

on the unique resources of the Whistler collections at the University of Glasgow, incorporating works of art, manuscripts, and publications from Whistler’s estate. Ten thousand letters and documents are included in the online edition of Whistler’s correspondence, published in 2003–2004, at http://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence. 

Added to this are websites illustrating the collections of the Freer Gallery of Art, the 

Hunterian Art Gallery and Special Collections at the University of Glasgow, and other 

major galleries.8 These important resources are now joined by a catalogue raisonné of 

Whistler’s etchings, drypoints, and mezzotints, previewed at the University of Glasgow 

and at the Freer Gallery of Art in 2011, at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk. 

The Digital Catalogue

Where Edward G. Kennedy in 1910 had recorded 448 etchings, the new catalogue—

launched just over a century later—includes 490 etchings, drypoints, and mezzotints 

(and demotes three etchings that Kennedy included).9 The website includes some 5,000 

images; it is fully annotated and searchable and includes dates, titles, sites, subjects, 

states, history, publication, exhibitions, marketing, biographies, documentation, reviews, 

and discussion, as well as an examination of paper, ink, technique, and style. There are 

accounts of the sets of etchings published by dealers (the two “Venice Sets,” for instance) 

and of the sets and series conceived and printed by the artist, although not offi cially 

published (such as the “Naval Review” set of 1887). Whistler’s commentary on the sets 

provides illuminating glimpses both of his enthusiasm for his works and his method of 

marketing them through art dealers and newspapers.10

The online catalogue illuminates Whistler’s selling practice, as in letters to Marcus 

B. Huish of the Fine Art Society, London, regarding the commissioned Venice Set: “The 

etchings themselves are far more delicate in execution, more beautiful in subject and 

more important in interest than any of the old set,” Whistler wrote in 1880.11 Nine years 

later—still not having completed the edition of the Venetian etchings—he recommended 

a set of Dutch etchings to Huish:

Now—I have begun etchings here—that already give me great 

satisfaction . . . what I have already begun, is of far fi ner quality 

than all that has gone before—combining a minuteness of detail, 

always referred to with sadness by the Critics, who hark back to 

the Thames etchings, (forgetting that they wrote foolishly about 

those also, when they fi rst appeared!) with greater freedom and 

more beauty of execution than even the Venice set, or the last 

Renaissance lot can pretend to.12

And in between, he was writing his own press handouts regarding etchings produced on his honeymoon: “Mr Whistler ... has in his journeyings in sunny France, not 

been idle—He brings back with him some forty new etchings of the fi nest quality. 

Those who have seen them, in Paris, say that the elegancies of the French RenaisWhistlerBook.indb 28 WhistlerBook.indb 28 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
Whistler Etchings Project 29

sance have never been so exquisitely rendered as in their fairy like plates.”13

The catalogue raisonné also includes documentary evidence on the exhibition and 

marketing of the etchings and on their production and printing. There is a glossary 

of printing terms applicable to Whistler’s work and summaries of the artist’s and the 

researchers’ working practices. At present, the survey includes 9,600 impressions, and 

more data are still being added (one of the advantages of working online). For instance, 

the range of Western and Asian papers used by the artist is currently being surveyed by 

the Library of Congress and other major collections, and the reviews of exhibitions are 

to be extended.

The online publication has clear advantages and is of a manageable size. Imagine a 

printed catalogue of 490 etchings, showing between one and twenty-one states of each 

one, comparative photos of sites and sitters, and works by other artists either infl uencing or infl uenced by Whistler; add images of all the etchings exhibited by Whistler, for 

instance, in the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (59 of them) and all the 

prints owned by collectors such as Charles Lang Freer (743) and all the portraits, for 

example, of the Leyland family of Liverpool—a dozen or so—and all the works in a collection such as the Baltimore Museum of Art (235) or The Hunterian (689, plus copper 

plates) and all those with the word “nocturne” in the title (7) or even the word “little” 

(97), and the result is anything but little. The resulting book would fi ll a fair-sized room 

and be prohibitively expensive. But online, this information is searchable at the touch of a 

button. And any image or page of text can be printed for further study if required—but 

preferably not the whole lot, which would require the sacrifi ce of several trees.

The etchings are reproduced at high resolution and can be enlarged easily, allowing 

truly startling details to be studied at leisure. Close examination can reveal details that 

change the whole subject and meaning of a work, such as the shuttle in La Rétameuse

(G.26), the spindle in Gretchen at Heidelberg (G.21), a child’s dress in Cutler Street, Houndsditch (G. 361), and a subversive butterfl y in The Church—Brussels (Adoration) (G.340). A 

detail of a poster reading “AMBER” in Bird-Cages, Chelsea (Figure 1) turns out to be a theater poster for The Amber Heart by Alfred Cecil Calmour, which opened at the Lyceum 

Theatre on May 10, 1887, starring Ellen Terry and Beerbohm Tree, thus providing both a 

date and context for the etching and links to other theatrical references.

Not only the etchings 

themselves but also the copper 

plates can be studied online: 

there are, for instance, over 300 

copper plates in The Hunterian 

alone. These were scanned, 

and the resulting high-defi nition 

images convey details of the 

artist’s technique and show the 

fi nal stage of the composition. 

A number of these plates were 

never printed, or at least no 

impression survives, so after 

these plates were scanned, the 

image was fl ipped horizontally, 

converted to grayscale, and 

FIGURE 1. James McNeill Whistler, Bird-Cages, Chelsea (G.297, state 

1 of 2), 1887. Etching and drypoint, 15 × 22.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, 

F1903.30.

WhistlerBook.indb 29 WhistlerBook.indb 29 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
30 Palaces of Art 

color inverted with enhanced contrast to produce “virtual 

impressions” of images that were, until now, completely 

unknown. These images include portraits of Whistler 

(G.318) and of his wife, who is probably the Woman Sleeping in a Chair (Figure 2). The two Whistlers collaborated in 

the studio, and a small etching done by James and Beatrice, 

View from the Chateau Walls, Loches (Figure 3), is included 

in the catalogue beside Whistler’s own panoramic view of 

the scene, From Agnes Sorrel’s Walk, Loches (Figure 4). Thus, 

Whistler’s total known oeuvre is enlarged, and a true 

picture of his output and the range of his work is available 

for the fi rst time.

The catalogue also includes etchings that are fully 

documented, although no impression has yet been located. 

One example is Emanuel Hospital (G.469), recorded in 

a letter from Whistler of 1892.14 The copper plate was 

apparently in Whistler’s estate, and some impressions 

were printed from it by Nathaniel Sparks in 1931, at the 

request of Whistler’s sister-in-law Rosalind Birnie Philip. 

Sparks’s quick sketch of the plate is the sole visual record 

of the etching, but he mistook it for a view of the Charterhouse.15 The plate is now missing, and no impression—

not even one printed by Sparks—has yet been located. If 

one was signed by Sparks and listed under the wrong title, 

Whistler’s connection with it may have been concealed: 

somewhere in an attic or a skip there may be a unique if 

slightly dusty survival.

To the general public, original etchings and drypoints 

may be less familiar than oil paintings simply because they 

cannot be displayed for as long. Oils can be shown more or 

less indefi nitely, but works on paper have to be displayed in 

lower light and for shorter periods. In theory, anyone can 

visit the print rooms of the National Gallery of Art, the Art 

Institute of Chicago, or the British Museum, but space is often limited and care must be taken in handling fragile works. 

In fact, only those with time, persistence, transport, good 

eyesight, and a magnifying glass can fully enjoy the treasures 

FIGURE 2. James McNeill Whistler, 

Woman Sleeping in a Chair (G.401, 

state 1 of 1). Digital impression, 

10.2 × 6.8 cm. © The Hunterian, 

University of Glasgow, 2012.

FIGURE 3. James McNeill Whistler, 

View from the Chateau Walls, 

Loches (G.420, state 2 of 2). Etching, 8.6 × 5.1 cm. © The Hunterian, 

University of Glasgow, 2012. 

FIGURE 4. James McNeill Whistler, From Agnes Sorrel’s Walk, 

Loches (G.419, state 1 of 3). 

Etching, 13.5 × 27.1 cm. © The 

Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 

2012.

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Whistler Etchings Project 31

of the world’s print rooms. It is well worth the 

effort but simply not possible for everyone. 

Furthermore, the online catalogue brings 

together works that can never be seen side by side 

in real life. Works in the Freer Gallery, for instance, 

cannot be lent to other institutions, and the same 

embargo applies to some of the prints and all the 

copper plates from Whistler’s estate in the University of Glasgow. Impressions in Los Angeles are 

unlikely to be united very often with those in the 

University of Michigan, the Walker Art Gallery in 

Liverpool, or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France 

in Paris, so comparisons of the state and inking and 

paper of certain works are practically impossible 

without the facilities provided by an online website. 

New Insights

The lovely etching and drypoint Speke Hall: 

The Avenue (Figures 5 and 6) is a good example of 

the information and insights to be gained from this 

method of research and display. The etching, known 

under several titles, was exhibited as Speke Hall: The 

Avenue at the Grosvenor Gallery, the palace of the 

Aesthetic movement, in 1879.16 Early impressions 

were dated 1870 and signed “Whistler,” but the fi nal 

state is signed with Whistler’s butterfl y monogram 

in a style that can be dated to around 1878. The 

etching was printed right through the 1870s, possibly until August 14, 1879, when Whistler recorded 

printing one impression.17

The fi gure in the foreground may be Frances 

Leyland, wife of Frederick Richards Leyland, 

the Liverpool shipowner. She was the sitter for 

Whistler’s oil portrait Symphony in Flesh Colour and 

Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland—an icon of the 

Aesthetic movement (see Siewert, Figure 8)—and 

a drypoint, The Velvet Dress (G.120), which, with 

its elegant line and simple composition, might also 

be considered an example of Art for Art’s Sake.

Frances Leyland may have posed for Speke Hall: The 

Avenue when Whistler was visiting Speke (Figure 7) 

for extended periods between 1870 and 1875. The 

pose was altered in later states, the dress changed to fi t the fashion of the later 1870s, 

when the fi gure of Frances Leyland may have been replaced with that of Whistler’s 

mistress, Maud Franklin. The dress was drawn with sweeping drypoint lines that print 

with a slightly furry burr, conveying the rich textures of fur and silk or satin. The backFIGURE 5. James McNeill Whistler, Speke 

Hall: The Avenue (G.101, state 3 of 14), 

1870. Etching and drypoint, 22.8 × 15.2 cm. 

Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, 

F1898.332.

FIGURE 6. James McNeill Whistler, Speke 

Hall: The Avenue (G.101, state 7 of 14), 

1870–78. Etching and drypoint, 22.8 × 15.2 

cm. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 

2012.

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32 Palaces of Art 

ground, however, is pure etching, with fi ne detailed lines and shading that convey the 

bare wintry branches of tall trees surrounding the elaborate fi ve-gabled, half-timbered 

hall. It is an accurate view, except possibly for the front entrance, which is somewhat 

concealed by bushes and unfi nished. 

In her groundbreaking book The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler, Katharine 

Lochnan suggests that this print shows the strong infl uence of Japanese woodcuts: 

Whistler employed with reasonable success the compositional 

structure which he had learnt from Japanese prints, selecting a 

high viewpoint, “tilting up” the background, and constructing a 

shallow picture space. The long, lean vertical format of the etching, 

which emphasizes the distance between the fi gure and the house, 

resembles that of the Japanese oban print. ... [He] isolated the 

foreground fi gure, silhouetting it against a white ground in the 

Japanese manner, and creating an uneasy tension between the 

fi gure and the house. ... The position of the fi gure, seen from the 

rear in a three-quarter pose, appears to have been adopted from 

Japanese prints. In the ukiyo-e woodcut, a rear view of this kind is 

often used to show off the beauty of a kimono.18

However, although Whistler’s fi gure is seen from behind in early states, in later ones 

she appears in profi le to left, with head bent. A comparable woman in profi le, isolated 

against a blank space, is seen in the ink and watercolor study Profi le of Geisha by Katsushika Hokusai (Figure 8), bought by Charles Lang Freer in 1902—three years after he 

bought an impression of Speke Hall: The Avenue. Japanese fi gure studies more often show 

the face in three-quarter view, and back views are more commonly found in scenes 

where a woman is looking at a view, as in Hokusai’s famous image of Mount Fuji in the 

woodcut The Sazaido Hall of the Temple, Gohyakurakanji, from the series Thirty-Six Views 

of Mount Fuji (Figure 9). This print utilizes multiple perspectives, a high viewpoint, and a 

gap between fi gures and view, all elements found in Whistler’s print. Although it is well 

known that Whistler admired the work of Hokusai and Hiroshige—and indeed woodcuts from Hiroshige’s Rokuju-yo Shu Meisho Zue (from the series Views of Famous Places 

in the Sixty-Odd Provinces) appear in his 1864 oil Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden 

Screen19—his Asian art collection was dispersed at the time of his bankruptcy in 1879, 

and only a few items in the Hunterian, the British Museum, and the Burrell Collection 

can be traced back to Whistler. Further research is required to investigate that collection and its impact on the work of Whistler and contemporaries.

FIGURE 7. Speke Hall, Liverpool, 2009. Photograph by author. 

WhistlerBook.indb 32 WhistlerBook.indb 32 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler Etchings Project 33

Whistler never attempted woodcut (although 

his wife did in the early 1890s), but he worked in 

etching, drypoint, mezzotint (not very successfully), lithography, and lithotint. The copper plate 

for Speke Hall: The Avenue, produced by Whistler’s 

favorite merchants, Hughes & Kimber in London, 

is similar in size and bears a similar maker’s stamp 

to twelve other plates used in this period, including another Liverpool subject, Shipbuilder’s Yard, 

Liverpool (G.142), and other portraits such as Tillie: 

A Model (G.113), The Guitar Player (M. W. Ridley)

(G.124), The Piano (G.144)—a study of Walter 

Greaves’s sister Alice—and The Silk Dress (G.151), 

which may show Frances Leyland’s sister Elizabeth 

Dawson. 

Astonishingly, Speke Hall: The Avenue went 

through fourteen different states, during which 

Whistler outlined, revised, and completed the 

house and radically changed the foreground fi gure, 

its dress, and pose. As many as thirty impressions 

of Speke Hall: The Avenue may have been printed 

(twenty-four have been located). They were 

printed in black ink on a variety of papers, including “antique” (pre-1800) laid papers, some with 

De Erven De Blauw, Pro Patria, Arms of Amsterdam, and other watermarks, and a few on Asian 

papers. Some sheets were taken from old books 

or ledgers; one even bears a Latin inscription on 

the verso.20

Exhibitions of the etching after the 1879 

Grosvenor Gallery (after Whistler and Leyland 

had quarreled and after Leyland’s lease of Speke 

Hall had expired) included shows at the Union 

League Club in New York in 1881, the print dealers H. Wunderlich & Co. in New York in 1898 

and 1903 and Obach & Co. in London in 1903, 

the Caxton Club in Chicago in 1900, and the 

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1902, 

as well as the memorial shows after Whistler’s 

death. Lenders included major collectors such as S. P. Avery of New York, Brian Lathrop 

of Chicago, and Howard Mansfi eld, the New York lawyer who wrote the useful—but not 

illustrated—catalogue of Whistler’s etchings in 1908. 

Collectors and dealers are recorded as buying impressions from 1877 onward—

Charles Augustus Howell, for instance, bought one print from Whistler for the bargain 

price of £1 1s. 0d. in 1877, and the Royal Library at Windsor paid £4 4s. 0d. for another, 

which was sold in 1906 and presumably helped to pay Edward VII’s debts.21 Other collectors included Joshua H. Hutchinson, whose fi ne early proofs fetched the high prices 

FIGURE 8. Katsushika Hokusai, Profi le of 

Geisha, Edo period, ca. 1806–8. Ink and color 

on paper, 51.9 × 18.1 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of 

Charles Lang Freer, F1902.41.

WhistlerBook.indb 33 WhistlerBook.indb 33 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
34 Palaces of Art 

of £8 8s. 0d. and £9 12s. 0d. in 1892.22 Freer bought an impression of the third state 

that had come originally from the artist’s brother-in-law, Francis Seymour Haden, who 

sold it through H. Wunderlich & Co. in 1898 (see Figure 5). From these contemporary 

collections, impressions went to form the basis of the great American print collections—

Avery’s to the New York Public Library, for instance, Lathrop’s to the Art Institute of 

Chicago, and Freer’s to the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There are also 

a few impressions recorded and illustrated in Kennedy’s catalogue that have not been 

located and are still out there, we hope, waiting to be discovered.

Most recorded impressions of Speke Hall: The Avenue are in American collections: 

in addition to those already mentioned, they include the Boston Public Library, the 

Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the 

Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Syracuse University Art Galleries, and the University 

of Michigan Museum of Art. In Europe, there is one late impression in the Bibliothèque 

Nationale de France, Paris; two in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; and one and a bit 

in The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. (Curiously, the artist had been left with only a 

fragment of the third state, so The Hunterian, inheritor of his estate, bought a complete 

impression of the tenth state from Colnaghi in 1967.)23 Similarly, the Walker Art Gallery, 

intent for obvious reasons on acquiring an interesting group of the Liverpool subjects, 

bought impressions of Speke Hall: The Avenue comparatively recently. The gallery actually 

bought two fi ne impressions, a sixth state from the Kennedy Galleries in 1967 and a ninth 

state from Sotheby’s in 1975.24 Thus, to study and enjoy the variations in different states 

of this etching, it is necessary to visit a dozen public collections in three countries—or 

simply to access http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/, search for “Speke,” and click on 

catalogue number 101, Speke Hall: The Avenue. 

FIGURE 9. Katsushika Hokusai, The Sazaido Hall of the Temple, Gohyakurakanji from the series Thirty-Six Views of 

Mount Fuji, Turban-shell Hall of the Five-Hundred-Raka Temple, 1830–35. Woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 

24.5 × 37 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of the family of Eugene and Agnes 

E. Meyer, F1974.63.

WhistlerBook.indb 34 WhistlerBook.indb 34 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler Etchings Project 35

Online Access

The website for the Whistler Etchings Project has been available from the start of 

the project in 2004. James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a Catalogue Raisonné went online 

to the public in October 2011 with an online exhibition and other information. The 

website statistics analyzing visits to the site are revealing, showing how dramatically it 

changes the possibilities for research and recreation. Visits to the site during this period 

ranged from around 1,500 a month in early 2011 to 2,000 a day (or 61,133 a month) after 

the launch of the fi rst stage of the catalogue raisonné in December 2011. In that month, 

there were 374,786 hits, with visitors consulting 309,695 pages in total—an average of 

500 hits an hour, with 9,990 pages visited every day. 

A high proportion of visitors to the website came from the United States, followed 

by the United Kingdom, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany and other European Union 

countries, Russia, Mexico, New Zealand, Israel, India, Brazil, Turkey, and Australia. The 

search strings used to access the site indicate a wide range of interests apart from the 

obvious “Whistler etchings,” including “How to identify the state of Whistler etching” and inquiries on specifi c etchings and biographies, such as those of E. W. Godwin, 

Frances Dawson (later Mrs. Leyland), and so on. These were followed up using various 

searches in the etchings catalogue. 

The Whistler Etchings Project was underpinned by a Major Research Grant from 

the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council in 2004, plus substantial grants from the 

Lunder Foundation that enabled us to extend the scope of the catalogue, for which we 

are enormously grateful. We also received support from Glasgow University’s Chancellor’s Fund, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the International Fine 

Print Dealers Association, private foundations, and art dealers (Thomas Colville Fine 

Art, New York, and the Fine Art Society, London). The project was based on collaboration between the University of Glasgow, the Freer Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute 

of Chicago. Producing the catalogue involved extensive collaboration with art dealers, 

librarians, curators, and private collectors, particularly in United States and the EU, including the Baltimore Museum of Art, the British Museum, the New York Public Library, 

Colby College Museum of Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, as well as valuable advice from a distinguished editorial board and the assistance of numerous students, 

interns, and honorary research fellows.

A “Contact Us” form on the site has resulted in a steady stream of inquiries from 

people owning etchings, from students writing essays, and from scholars, artists, and 

people with a general interest in prints, printmaking, the history of art, the art market, 

and so on, as well as comments from people who have taken the time to thank us for 

producing the website: “Congratulations on a quite stupendous achievement!” wrote 

one nonacademic visitor. “The site is so easy to use and fast, and the information on 

each etching is extraordinary. ... Thank you so much, what a tribute to the greatest 

modern etcher of them all.”25 Several galleries and collectors, particularly in the United 

States, have contacted us, wishing to add their collections and data, as well as asking 

questions. Others, whose support helped to make the catalogue a success, offered 

generous praise: “Congratulations to you on the Whistler etching catalogue raisonné! 

What an incredible database! ... I have no doubt it will be an invaluable resource, and 

we feel fortunate to have been able to contribute a small part.”26

In 2009, the exhibition Whistler: The Gentle Art of Making Etchings was held at the 

WhistlerBook.indb 35 WhistlerBook.indb 35 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
36 Palaces of Art 

Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow and the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight to 

explore questions and discoveries that emerged during the project. The show received 

favorable reviews and was popular with visitors of all ages and countries.27 The exhibition 

appealed to a range of visitors and was well attended, with popular educational classes, 

lunchtime lectures, and so on. Myra Brown, a curator at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, 

reported reactions to the show in Liverpool: 

[It] was a very popular show with our visitors, who really 

appreciated the opportunity to discover another facet of 

Whistler’s art and to see the etchings so close up. We had 

nearly 32,500 visitors over the period ... with a daily average of 

405 over 80 days. ... This compares very well indeed with our 

previous exhibitions at the gallery and we were delighted with 

the response.28

Although this popular exhibition reached over 400 people a day, the online etchings website reached fi ve times that in its fi rst month—nearly 2,000 a day—and was 

visited by people of all ages from all over the world. Putting Whistler on the map via the 

Internet has been at times “laborious” but also exciting and deeply rewarding—and the 

etchings and drypoints continue to inspire and fascinate the authors of the catalogue, our 

supportive colleagues, and our new viewers worldwide.

Notes

 1. Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler (London: Heinemann and Lippincott, 1908), 2:50.

 2. Ralph Thomas, A Catalogue of the Etchings and Drypoints of James Abbott Macneil Whistler (London, 1874); Frederick Wedmore, Whistler’s Etchings: A Study and a Catalogue

(London, 1886; 2nd ed., 1889).

 3. Wedmore to Whistler, July 10, 1886, GUW 06290.

 4. Pennell Catalogue, PWC; Revillon Catalogue, Whistler Etchings Project and The 

Hunterian, University of Glasgow. 

 5. Howard Mansfi eld, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etchings and Dry-Points of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1909); Edward G. Kennedy, The Etched 

Work of Whistler (New York: Grolier Club, 1910).

 6. Market, Calais in Edward G. Kennedy, The Etched Work of Whistler (New York: 

Grolier Club, 1910), catalogue no. 350.

 7. Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish 

Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 1980); Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler, Drawings, Pastels and 

Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); 

The Lithographs of James McNeill Whistler, ed. Harriet K. Stratis and Martha Tedeschi, with contributions by Nesta R. Spink, Katharine Jordan Lochnan, and Nicholas Smale (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago in association with the Arie and Ida 

Crown Memorial, 1998).

 8. See, for example, Freer Gallery of Art, http://www.asia.si.edu; The Hunterian, http://

www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian; Special Collections, University of Glasgow, http://special.

lib.gla.ac.uk/manuscripts/search.

WhistlerBook.indb 36 WhistlerBook.indb 36 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler Etchings Project 37

 9. The demoted etchings from Kennedy, The Etched Work of Whistler, are A Youth 

Wearing a German Cap (K.5), signed “IW”; Village Street—A Fragment (K.151⁄2), an 

unfi nished etching by an unknown artist; and Portrait of a Lady (K. app. II), an etching 

by Francis Seymour Haden.

 10. See Grischka Petri, Arrangement in Business: The Art Markets and the Career of James 

McNeill Whistler (Hildesheim, Germany: Olms, 2011).

 11. Whistler to M. B. Huish, [January 21/26, 1880], GUW 02992. 

 12. Whistler to M. B. Huish, September 3, 1889, GUW 08803.

 13. Whistler to C. J. W. Hanson, [October 25, 1888], GUW 08842. 

 14. Whistler to W. Heinemann, [October 1892], GUW 10789. 

 15. Martin Hopkinson, “Nathaniel Sparks’ Printing of Whistler’s Etchings,” Print Quarterly 

16, no. 4 (1999): 340, 345, 349. 16. Third Summer Exhibition, Grosvenor Gallery 1879, 

catalogue no. 270.

 17. Whistler, list of etchings printed, August 14, 1879, GUW 13019. 

 18. Katharine A. Lochnan, The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (New Haven, CT: Yale 

University Press in association with the Art Gallery of Ontario, 1984), 158–59.

 19. Margaret F. MacDonald, “Whistler and the Thames,” in An American in London: Whistler and the Thames, exhibition catalogue, (London: Philip Wilson, 2013), 23–24.

 20. Watermarks include De Erven De Blauw at the Art Institute of Chicago 

(1934.552), National Gallery of Art (1943.3.8460), and New York Public Library 

(MEZAP, no accession number); C & I Honig at the Art Institute of Chicago 

(1938.1930); Pro Patria at the Boston Public Library (W.1646); IV countermark at 

the Freer Gallery of Art (F1898.332) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1954–7-

1); Arms of Amsterdam at The Hunterian (GLAHA 46768) and the Syracuse 

University Art Galleries (1963.0988); Hunting horn, at the University of Michigan 

Museum of Art (1954/1.354, with Latin writing on verso) and the Walker Art 

Gallery (10617); Asian paper at the National Gallery of Art (1987.41.68) and the 

Library of Congress (FP-XIX-W576 no. 96).

 21. Charles Augustus Howell to Whistler, [November 15, 1877], GUW 02179; Whistler to Royal Collection, [October 19/22, 1877], GUW 12736 (now in the National 

Gallery of Art, 1987.41.68).

 22. Sotheby’s, March 3, 1892, lots 137–39; one is now in the Library of Congress, FP-XIX-W576 no. 96.

 23. Kennedy, Etched Work of Whistler, catalogue no. 96, reproduced as states 4–10 

(G.101, states 6, 8, 10, 11, and 14). Speke Hall: The Avenue, The Hunterian GLAHA 

46768, fragment GLAHA 46769 (£80 0s. 0d.).

 24. Speke Hall: The Avenue, Walker Art Gallery 10617, 9066 (Kennedy Galleries, 1987; 

Sotheby’s, Belgravia, London, October 7, 1975, lot 130).

 25. E-mail correspondence with Whistler Etchings Project, January 6, 2012.

 26 Rena Hoisington, Baltimore Museum of Art, e-mail message to author, December 

2011.

 27. See, for example, Moira Jeffrey, “Whistler: The Gentle Art of Making Etchings,” 

Scotland on Sunday, February 1, 2009. Visitors’ Book (2009) comments include 

the following: “I recently did an art project including Whistler so it’s amazing to 

see his work in person” (Emily); “I really like this exhibition, I do art at college, 

WhistlerBook.indb 37 WhistlerBook.indb 37 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
38 Palaces of Art 

and I would like to give this technique a try” (Gordon); “This is an excellent and 

informative retrospective of Whistler. It provides manifold insights into his etching 

practices and celebrates his many fi elds of endeavour” (an Irish visitor); “Absolutely beautiful etchings—puts mine to shame—really captures the atmosphere in 

them and are so delicate” (a UK visitor); “The art work is of course lovely, and the 

information is displayed perfectly alongside it. I never knew Whistler did etching, 

now I feel like an expert” (Kathryn); “Good explanation of print methods, including nuances of etching/drypoint. Good to see your research made available to all 

during the project” (Paul).

 28. Myra Brown, Lady Lever Art Gallery, e-mail message to author, January 8, 2010.

WhistlerBook.indb 38 WhistlerBook.indb 38 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler and Art of the Americas

Erica E. Hirshler

“Mr. Whistler will not allow us to use the phrase ‘American art,’” wrote 

George Smalley in 1902 for Munsey’s Magazine, a popular journal that 

reinforced its own national credentials by calling itself “a magazine of the 

people and for the people.” Smalley had earned his stripes on the front during the Civil 

War as a newspaper reporter, acclaimed for his dramatic eyewitness account of the 

bloody battle at Antietam. After the war he became a foreign correspondent for the 

American press, and by the turn of the century Smalley was a man long familiar with 

the expatriate experience. He made a point of noting to his Munsey’s readers that James 

McNeill Whistler “had long since announced that art is of no nationality.” Smalley then 

declared, no matter how unpatriotic he knew his assessment would sound to his audience, that Whistler’s artistic career would not even have been possible in the United 

States.1

 What, then, is Whistler’s art now doing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in a 

wing devoted specifi cally to the art of the Americas? How do you take a painter who was 

so international and cosmopolitan in his outlook; a man who never refrained from correcting anyone who thought he might have been born anywhere on earth besides Lowell, 

Massachusetts; a citizen who left the United States in 1855, when he was twenty-one, 

and never returned—how do you take such an artist and display his work in galleries 

devoted to American art?

The presentation of paintings by Whistler in modern American museums triggers 

challenges and opportunities for curators as they seek to create galleries that are beautiful, coherent, and tell a story that a general visitor can follow. This paper explores Whistler’s changing position in museum displays of American art, focusing in particular on the 

Boston museum and its new wing for Art of the Americas, completed in 2010. The tour 

outlined here traverses galleries past and present and is intertwined with theoretical 

concepts, specifi cally the issues of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, which come up—or 

should come up—in the study of American art.

The question of nationality and nationalism is one that circulates continuously in 

American art, particularly in the late nineteenth century, an era of global connections 

eerily similar to our own. The subject arose around the career of John Singer Sargent, a 

painter who was not even born or educated in the United States, but about whom Henry 

James remarked that Americans “shall be well advised to claim him.”2

 Whistler himself 

would later tease Sargent about his nationality on the occasion of Sargent’s election as an 

associate of the Royal Academy in 1894; Whistler wrote to ask him (in language apprehended from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta HMS Pinafore) whether “in the face of great 

temptation” Sargent had chucked up his nation “to become an En-glish-man.” Sargent 

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40 Palaces of Art

replied that the London academicians had not requested that he “retouch” his nationality, 

noting with good humor, “I keep my twang.” Lest Whistler think he was kidding, Sargent 

added rather stiffl y, “If you should hear anything to the contrary, please state that there 

was no such transaction and that I am an American.”3

Was Whistler ever that fi rm on the subject? He sometimes referred to America as 

his home. Most often he declared himself American only when it was advantageous in legal 

terms: in August 1873, he fi rmly avowed his citizenship to avoid jury duty in London; in 

1890, he reminded his lawyer that he had full rights as a citizen in the United States in connection with an infringement of copyright to do with pirated editions of his written work; 

and several times in the 1890s he affi rmed his citizenship to avoid paying export duties 

on his works when shipping them to America.4

 Scholars Nicolai Cikovsky, Linda Merrill, 

and Lee Glazer, among others, have written extensively about Whistler as an American 

and about Whistler’s place in American art.5 I shall not repeat their work here but want 

to make note of it, for the issue is of critical importance in terms of how we, as curators, 

defi ne American art. 

Whistler, Sargent, and Mary Cassatt—to which curatorial department are they 

assigned, American or European? It varies from museum to museum, continent to continent. They have been European in Philadelphia but American in Boston. In Great Britain, Sargent has been rechristened “Singer Sargent” and is often considered British, but 

Cassatt seems never to be considered French in France. Yet her work relates much more 

closely to that of Edgar Degas than to paintings by any of her compatriots. In the newly installed nineteenth-century French galleries at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, 

DC, Cassatt is fi rmly ensconced with her French colleagues; only one canvas is displayed 

in a gallery with those of her fellow Americans. How do we select the painters we include 

in our galleries of American or of European art? And how do we explain those choices to 

our visitors? 

Whistler started his adult life by serving at one of the nation’s most patriotic institutions, the United States Military Academy at West Point, but by 1886 the American critic 

Charles de Kay confessed, “it would be hard to say to which nationality he belongs.”6 And 

Whistler cultivated that ambiguity, becoming French, English, or Japanese as the occasion 

suited him, wearing his nationality like a thin cloak, as if it were one of the diaphanous 

veils of color that envelop his landscapes, making them dreamlike and ambiguous, more 

Whistlerian in character than the Chilean, Italian, or British scenes they record. But 

although a critic for the New York Times announced in 1885 that Whistler had “forgotten 

everything American,” critic William C. Brownell declared in 1890 that Whistler was 

“more of an American than anything else.”7

 And that is where the issue came to rest at 

the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) when the curatorial staff, working since 2001 under the 

direction of department chair Elliot Bostwick Davis, began to plan a new wing devoted to 

arts of the Americas.

This newly built addition was designed by Foster + Partners of London; it includes 

fi fty-three galleries devoted to the display of over 5,000 works of art from the indigenous cultures of the ancient Americas to those of the third quarter of the twentieth century. As the spaces were planned, our curatorial team arrived at a common goal: not to 

create a ghetto of American art. Instead, we sought to look at American art in context, 

accepting that it was not created in isolation and embracing recent trends in scholarly 

practice that emphasize a cosmopolitan view. We also wanted to take advantage of the 

connections that could be made to the rest of the museum’s encyclopedic collections. 

WhistlerBook.indb 40 WhistlerBook.indb 40 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler and Art of the Americas 41

As Henry James had declared in 1867, the 

same year that Whistler fi rst displayed his 

Symphony in White, No. 3 (1865–67, Barber 

Institute of Fine Arts; YMSM 61), the arts 

in America were in the process of becoming a “vast intellectual fusion and synthesis 

of the various National tendencies of the 

world.”8 What better place, then, than in 

this new wing to display the art of Whistler, that master of fusion and synthesis?

We also hoped to explore, and 

to bring to our public’s attention, the 

constant push and pull between nationalism and cosmopolitanism that we felt 

defi ned American art, particularly in the 

nineteenth century. Paintings made in the 

same year can be radically different. For 

example, Fitz Henry Lane’s Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay (Figure 1), painted in 1862, depicts the rocky coast of Maine with a fi ne 

brush, giving every indication (if not the 

reality) of topographical accuracy. Lane 

idealized the view, correcting its contours 

and suffusing it with a moist, radiant sky 

that melds together pink and orange as 

if by magic. The scene has transfi xed 

Lane’s somewhat ungainly onlooker in the 

foreground, who pauses from his work 

to watch the transformation of dawn to 

day. In such quiet and poetical landscapes, 

Lane celebrated his native shores. But 

what of Whistler, who painted The Last 

of Old Westminster (Figure 2) that same 

year? There is little of America in Whistler’s canvas. Using a French Realist technique of 

viscous paint thickly applied with a fl at brush and troweled with a palette knife, Whistler 

built a bridge in London, refl ecting on a scene that few would have called beautiful or 

transcendent but that became so through his art. Whistler’s urban construction site is 

far from Lane’s seacoast sunrise. Aside from their shared materials—cloth, wood, and 

oil-based pigment—these two paintings are different in every way. But as curators, we 

must fi nd a way to make both of them feel at home in galleries dedicated to nineteenthcentury American art. 

The MFA had collected American art from its very beginning and invested in Whistler very early, during the artist’s lifetime; it was the second American institution (after 

the Philadelphia Museum of Art) to acquire Whistler’s work for its permanent collection. 

The fi rst of the MFA’s six paintings came in 1896.9

 Soon after he fi nished them, Whistler sold a pair of fi gure studies from 1895, The Master Smith of Lyme Regis (1895; YMSM 

450) and Little Rose of Lyme Regis (1895–96; YMSM 449), to Edward G. Kennedy of the 

FIGURE 1. Fitz Henry Lane, Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1862. 

Oil on canvas, 40 × 66.36 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest 

of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American 

Paintings, 1815–1865, 1948, 48.448. Photograph © 2013 Museum of 

Fine Arts, Boston.

FIGURE 2. James McNeill Whistler, The Last of Old Westminster, 1862. 

Oil on canvas, 60.96 × 78.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, A. Shuman Collection, 1939, 39.44. Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston.

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42 Palaces of Art

Wunderlich gallery in New York; the MFA bought them for $7,200. The next canvas 

came into the collection in 1909, a tiny street scene, Street in Old Chelsea (ca. 1880–85; 

YMSM 249), a gift from the great Boston collector, teacher, and color theorist Denman 

Ross, who had owned it by 1902. Ross was one of the city’s most voracious collectors 

and most generous benefactors of the museum—he acquired and donated thousands of 

objects, from Spanish colonial silver horse trappings to Japanese prints to avant-garde 

paintings by Claude Monet.

The Last of Old Westminster was next to enter the collection, albeit much later. The 

museum bought this important early painting in 1939 for $15,000 from one Mrs. John 

Riddle, a woman better known today as Theodate Pope, the architect and founder of 

the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. After its display at the Royal Academy in 1863, Whistler had sold The Last of Old Westminster to George Cavafy, a London 

merchant and one of the artist’s most important early patrons. Whistler had tried to buy 

it back in 1889, already feeling slighted that others were making profi ts on his paintings 

that should rightfully have been his. But Cavafy refused, and his son John inherited the 

painting in 1891. John Cavafy sold it to Kennedy in New York in June 1892, enjoying just 

the kind of profi t on the transaction that Whistler so resented. Kennedy sold the canvas 

to another New York dealer, and Alfred Pope, who already owned Whistler’s The Blue 

Wave, Biarritz (painted in 1862—the same year as The Last of Old Westminster—and now 

in the Hill-Stead Museum; YMSM 41), bought it in 1898. His daughter, Theodate Pope 

Riddle, inherited it upon her father’s death in 1913; her decision to sell it was most likely 

infl uenced by her continuing fi nancial commitment to her most important architectural 

project, Avon Old Farms School. 

A few years later, the MFA acquired Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, 

Venice (Figure 3). We prize this rare oil, completed during Whistler’s fourteen-month stay 

in the city, a time when he concentrated most of his energy on making etchings and pastels. 

Its damp, inky blue evening sky, illuminated only by golden lights fl ickering on the horizon, 

blends seamlessly into the dark waters of the lagoon, where a shadowy gondolier forms 

a ghostly human presence. The delicacy of Whistler’s brush perfectly captures the place 

Lord Byron had described in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage as a “fairy city of the heart,” and that 

visual refi nement belies the rather more coarse progress of the actual canvas. Richard A. 

Canfi eld, the most signifi cant American collector of Whistler’s work after Charles Lang 

Freer, had seized the opportunity to buy the painting when it came on the market after 

Whistler’s death in 1903. Canfi eld was a gambler, the proprietor of fashionable (if illegal) 

houses in New York City, Saratoga Springs, and Newport. But he was also a refi ned and 

cultured collector, and near the end of Whistler’s life, Canfi eld had developed a friendship 

with the artist. Whistler painted Canfi eld’s portrait (1901–3, present location unknown; 

YMSM 547), admired his connoisseurship, and was amused by his unsavory reputation. 

Canfi eld died in 1914 after injuries sustained in a subway accident; his paintings were sold at 

auction, and the Nocturne in Blue and Silver came down through one family until it was sold 

to the MFA in 1942 for $9,000.

The last painting by Whistler to enter the museum’s collection was Harmony in Flesh 

Colour and Red (ca. 1869; YMSM 91), purchased in 1960 for $12,000. The painting had come 

through a variety of British collections before being consigned to Durlacher Brothers, a 

New York fi rm with roots in London. It was sent to Boston in September 1960 and approved by the Collections Committee in October, but director Perry Rathbone confessed 

to the dealer that to his surprise, and despite his own enthusiasm for the picture, getting it 

WhistlerBook.indb 42 WhistlerBook.indb 42 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler and Art of the Americas 43

past the museum’s trustees “was not an easy task.”10 The reasons for their hesitation went 

unrecorded—perhaps the painting no longer fi t their conception of American art, which 

not only had dropped in esteem but also was then defi ned along more nationalist lines. 

Only three other American paintings were purchased that year, two early twentieth-century street scenes of Boston by George Luks and an abstract still life by the Massachusetts 

painter Karl Knaths.

Over the years there have been different strategies for displaying Whistler’s paintings. The changes refl ect the general history of museums, the fashions for display, and 

the shifting status and defi nition of American art. The MFA, founded in 1870, opened its 

doors on July 4, 1876, the nation’s centennial, a patriotic day if ever there was one. Its 

earliest displays matched those of many museums of the period; the collections were 

installed by medium. All paintings, no matter their national origin, were hung together 

roughly chronologically, and thus Winslow Homer and Jean-François Millet appeared in 

the same room. These early displays were crowded, hung tightly together in Salon style, 

an installation technique that lasted into the early twentieth century. A photograph 

documents Whistler’s Little Rose and the Master Smith hanging one above the other in an 

arrangement from around 1900 that no doubt would have been anathema to the artist 

(Figure 4). 

Few photographs seem to have been taken of the early installations in the MFA’s new 

building on Huntington Avenue, which opened in 1909, and none of them show Whistler’s 

work, despite the museum’s growing collection of his art. The paintings galleries in the 

1909 building divided the European and American displays, a strategy that persisted in 1915 

FIGURE 3. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, 1879–80. Oil on canvas, 50.16 

× 65.4 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Emily L. Ainsley Fund, 1942, 42.302. Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston.

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44 Palaces of Art

when the new Evans Wing galleries for paintings opened, elegant new rooms with colored 

fabric-covered walls and gently coved ceilings with fl at skylights. Although the history of 

the MFA’s building and collections expansion cannot be related here, an important turning 

point came in the 1940s, with the gift of 233 paintings from Maxim and Martha Karolik, 

who sought to rediscover and redefi ne the fi eld of American art through a new appreciation of the paintings produced in the United States between 1815 and 1865. The MFA reconfi gured its galleries to display the Karolik Collection together for a period of fi ve years 

(as promised to the donors) in the rooms formerly used as a cast court.11

The Karolik Collection is one of several important assemblages of American art 

formed in the fi rst half of the twentieth century that favored a nationalist perspective. It 

coincided with current events—the Depression, World War II—that fostered a patriotic approach to the fi eld, and in direct consequence, the reputations of Whistler and 

his fellow expatriates plummeted. When the MFA’s galleries were again reorganized 

beginning in the 1950s, the general 

standing of American art had also 

begun to fall. At the MFA, European 

and American paintings were now 

separated by fl oor, and American 

art got the inferior space: European paintings were installed in all 

the gracious skylit galleries on the 

second level of the Evans Wing, and 

the American works got the spaces 

carved out belowstairs—with lower 

ceilings, dropped fl uorescent tracks, 

and walls painted white. Installation 

photographs record Whistler’s 

Lagoon hanging there, looking a little 

forlorn between a Ralph Blakelock 

and an Albert Pinkham Ryder (Figure 

5). Things improved in a 1982 to 1986 

renovation, when the lighting system 

was modernized and the walls were 

painted in more harmonious colors. Photographs of the galleries at 

that time show Whistler’s Last of 

Old Westminster displayed alongside 

other urban views by Childe Hassam 

and other American painters with a 

European sensibility. 

Fashions in museum display 

would again begin to change, now 

inspired by the theatricality of such 

special exhibitions as the landmark 

show Treasure Houses of Britain, held 

at the National Gallery of Art in 

Washington from 1985 to 1986, with 

FIGURE 5. Paintings gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 

1964, showing Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice

(1879–80; YMSM 212). Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston.

FIGURE 4. Paintings gallery in the Copley Square building, 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1902, showing Little Rose of Lyme 

Regis (1895–96; YMSM 449) and The Master Smith of Lyme Regis

(1895; YMSM 450). Photograph © T. E. Marr photography and 

courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

WhistlerBook.indb 44 WhistlerBook.indb 44 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler and Art of the Americas 45

elaborate installations that New York Times critic Hilton Kramer described as “so powerfully evocative that they bring a whole period to life.”12 The arrangement of the MFA’s 

galleries started to break free from long-standing media-based assemblages; rooms were 

reorganized over time to create more mixed displays of paintings, furniture, and decorative arts. These became progressively more elaborate, dense, and complex, especially 

after 2004, when the existing galleries were transformed into incubators for ideas that 

would be implemented more fully in the MFA’s new wing (Figure 6). This kind of work 

necessitated a new level of fi nancial and intellectual commitment on the part of the museum, not only in materials (platforms, cases, special fi nishes) but also in terms of staff: 

curators, designers, conservators, preparators, and crew. The rooms were an aesthetic 

and popular success and led directly to the installations planned for the new galleries.

The wing for Art of the Americas was one part of a new master site plan commissioned by the museum’s trustees and director, Malcolm Rogers, and undertaken by Foster 

+ Partners. It involved the reorientation of visitor traffi c throughout the building, improved 

accessibility within the 1909 and 1915 entrances, additional visitor amenities, a new special 

exhibition gallery, auditorium, and classrooms—and those fi fty-three galleries, over 50,000 

square feet, larger than some museums. Although the results now look effortless, the 

planning process lasted for almost ten years and involved many people from a variety of 

areas of expertise. Some decisions came easily; others were hard won over time.13 Careful 

attention was paid to the challenges of making old art look well in modern spaces; all parties involved in the process came to unite behind the idea that the collections should come 

fi rst. Elliot Bostwick Davis and her curatorial team were also driven by new ideas about the 

defi nition of American art. The wing was meant to be inclusive of all the Americas, from 

ancient times to the last third of the twentieth century. Old divisions based on medium 

were no longer considered sacred, allowing our visitors to experience a holistic, integrated 

FIGURE 6. Susan Morse Hilles Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2005, showing Little Rose of Lyme Regis

(1895–96; YMSM 449) and The Master Smith of Lyme Regis (1895; YMSM 450). Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston.

WhistlerBook.indb 45 WhistlerBook.indb 45 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
46 Palaces of Art

environment of fi ne and decorative arts. The four fl oors of the wing were divided into 

chronological segments, creating a clear organizational scheme for visitors and allowing the 

largest parts of the collection, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century holdings, to occupy 

the two levels that contained the most gallery space. 

Because the MFA is an encyclopedic museum, blessed with important collections 

from around the world and across time, our strategies of interpretation and display were 

intended to make connections between art made in the Americas (and works made by 

Americans abroad) and the art of other places and periods. American art was born of 

trade and contact, and we hoped to explicate for our visitors that relationship to other 

cultures and thereby to the rest of the MFA’s collections. Sometimes these explanations 

take the form of actual juxtapositions between (for example) eighteenth-century Boston 

silver and its British prototypes, but more often connections are made through labeling, 

photographs, and on our handheld multimedia guide, which provides information and 

images of related objects on view throughout the museum.

And where is Whistler? The fi rst gallery of the nineteenth-century fl oor is devoted 

to his fellow expatriate John Singer Sargent. The designation was made not only in deference to the strength of the MFA’s holdings of that artist’s work but also to make evident 

a newer and more cosmopolitan approach to the art of the century. Whistler’s work 

appears in the gallery just to the right, a room devoted to the Aesthetic movement and 

to cosmopolitanism. Three superb stained-glass windows, two by John La Farge and one 

by Louis Comfort Tiffany, introduce the room. With these masterpieces of decorative 

arts placed in such a central location, given the pride of place most often reserved for 

paintings, the curators also sought to communicate another feature of nineteenth-century art—the rise in importance and critical standing of new media.14

As the visitor enters the Aesthetic movement gallery and passes by the stained-glass 

windows, a wall of Whistlers unfolds. Passing before the Master Smith, the Nocturne in 

Blue and Silver, and Little Rose of Lyme Regis, one next encounters an array of objects that 

speak to the taste for Japan, Whistler’s Harmony in Flesh Colour and Red among them. The 

adjacent wall, again devoted to paintings, features The Last of Old Westminster. But if the 

visitor turned around, he or she would see one of the surprises concocted to vary the 

visual experience, a vignette devoted to the eclecticism of the period (Figure 7).

The vignette, inspired in part by recent installations at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, came together as a result of several new acquisitions. The fi rst was an 

intricately carved fi replace surround that was offered to the MFA as a gift in 2008; it 

provided a focal point for the display.15 The fi replace had once been part of the drawing 

room of a townhouse at 196 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay. Completed 

in 1881 by Boston architects Peabody and Stearns, Elizabeth Spooner’s house refl ected 

the current fashion for Colonial Revival architecture as well as her own passion for Asia, 

where she had lived in the 1850s. Some of the carved elements of this fi replace were 

probably imported from China, but the surround was fi lled out and assembled by local 

Boston craftsmen. The painting that once hung over the mantel was long gone, and we 

had thought to fi ll it with one of our decorative panels by La Farge. But then a painting 

came on the market by a little-known American artist who had worked with La Farge, 

John Humphreys Johnston. He made Le Domino Rose in Paris in about 1895, and by some 

miracle, the canvas fi t almost exactly into the empty spot. The curators conceived the 

vignette around the fi replace, now enhanced by Johnston’s contemplative fi gure study, 

using it to bring together period furniture, ceramics, paintings (including Whistler’s Street 

WhistlerBook.indb 46 WhistlerBook.indb 46 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler and Art of the Americas 47

in Old Chelsea), glassware, metalwork, and antique Turkish tiles collected by Bostonians in 

the nineteenth century.

While Johnston’s vivid fuchsia painting provides drama, Whistler is the thread that 

binds everything in the gallery together. Most of the other paintings in the room relate 

to one another through Whistler. Johnston, from a wealthy New York family, fi rst 

studied art with La Farge and then went to Europe. Little is known about his career, 

but he was active in Paris in the 1890s, and he knew both Whistler and John White 

Alexander. A letter of about 1894 reveals that Johnston had invited Whistler to a lunch 

he was hosting for La Farge (Whistler could not go), and one to Richard Canfi eld in 

1902 tells us that Whistler was still in touch with Johnston, asking him to report on 

how his paintings had been installed at the Société Nationale exhibition in Paris.16 John 

White Alexander’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil (1897), his masterpiece and one of the 

only American paintings to capture fully the decadence of the Art Nouveau, is also 

featured in the gallery. Alexander had known Whistler since 1879 or 1880, when he 

was in Venice with the “Duveneck boys.” He had started to make a portrait of Whistler in London in 1886, and a few years later, when Alexander settled in Paris in 1891, 

he reestablished his friendship with Whistler, who arrived there the following year. 

The gallery also includes works by William Merritt Chase, who was one of Whistler’s 

chief admirers and promoters in the United States, although their personal friendship 

had dissolved into quarrels in 1885, and by the painter and photographer Edward 

Steichen, who was profoundly infl uenced by Whistler from the time he fi rst saw the 

master’s work in reproduction at the Milwaukee Public Library. Whistler is also the 

pivot around which our discussions of style hang; for example, he brings together our 

group of Japanese-infl ected objects, encouraging comparison to works of art in other 

areas of the MFA’s collection. The display and its accompanying interpretative materials 

are designed to open intellectual doors among the arts of the United States, England, 

FIGURE 7. Robert P. and Carol T. Henderson Gallery (The Aesthetic Movement, 1870–1900), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2010, showing Street in Old Chelsea (ca. 1880–85: YMSM 249). Photograph © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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48 Palaces of Art

France, and Japan. Rather than standing apart from the art of his time, Whistler serves 

to bring its disparate strands together. 

In September 1867, Henry James wrote to his friend Thomas Perry in an oft-quoted 

letter that stated, “To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect and a drawback.” But James also declared that to be an American was “an excellent preparation for 

culture,” insofar as Americans could deal, more freely than Europeans, “with forms of 

civilization not their own,” could “pick and choose and assimilate and in short (aesthetically etc.) claim our property wherever we fi nd it.”17 James’s words about picking and 

choosing fi nd an echo in one of Whistler’s own remarks in his Ten O’Clock lecture: “Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains 

the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, 

these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and 

forms his chords, until he bring forth from chaos glorious harmony.”18

Have the MFA’s curators and designers picked and chosen well enough to bring forth 

from a chaos of objects a glorious and harmonious presentation? What would Whistler 

think of the display we have created? One suspects that as an artist who cared deeply 

about design and decoration, who carefully planned several of his own exhibition installations with color arrangements as sophisticated as those of the works within them, he 

might have enjoyed seeing his paintings hang on a simple blue-gray wall. Or perhaps, as 

the designer of the Peacock Room, Whistler would have appreciated the encrusted spectacle of the Aesthetic movement vignette. By having both installation strategies in play, 

we impart much more about the fi ne art of display and its effects on objects, lessons that 

Whistler was anxious to teach. 

This variety of installation styles in Boston’s new wing was deliberate, part of a plan 

to remind visitors that the very look of the galleries (and not just the objects within them) 

can refl ect a historic period or a particular place and, of course, is always subject to individual taste. In the end, the new walls on which Whistler’s paintings hang are not so different (if a bit less densely installed) than the ones so carefully designed to demonstrate 

Whistler’s aesthetic for his 1904 memorial exhibition at the Copley Society in Boston. 

The walls of those rooms 

were specially painted a 

light gray and then covered 

with a silvery, iridescent, 

woven grass cloth; the rows 

of paintings were punctuated 

with Japanese carvings above 

them and over the doorways (Figure 8). In the end, 

when visitors experience 

the galleries in the MFA 

now dedicated to art of the 

Americas, we can but hope 

that Charles Lang Freer’s 

words of 1902 still ring 

true: “The Boston People 

really seem to care for Mr. 

Whistler’s work.”19

FIGURE 8. Whistler Memorial Exhibition, Copley Hall, Boston, 1904. Charles 

Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archives, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Photograph by Thomas Marr.

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Whistler and Art of the Americas 49

Notes

 1. George W. Smalley, “American Artists Abroad,” Munsey’s Magazine, April 1902, 45.

 2. Henry James, “John S. Sargent,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1887, 683.

 3. Whistler to Sargent, January 20, 1894, GUW 02669; Sargent to Whistler, [January 

22, 1894], GUW 05387.

 4. Whistler to James Anderson Rose, August 25, 1873, GUW 12155; Whistler to 

George Henry Lewis, [March 22, 1890], GUW 02553; (for an example) Whistler to 

Charles Lang Freer, January 16, 1892, GUW 11703.

 5. See, for example, Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., with Charles Brock, “Whistler and America,” 

in James McNeill Whistler, ed. Richard Dorment and Margaret F. MacDonald (New 

York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995), 29–38; Linda Merrill, “Whistler in America,” in After 

Whistler: The Artist and His Infl uence on American Painting, ed. Linda Merrill (New 

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 10–31; Lee Glazer, “Whistler, America, and 

the Memorial Exhibition of 1904,” in After Whistler, 86–96.

 6. Charles de Kay, “Whistler, the Head of the Impressionists,” Art Review 1 (1886): 1, as 

quoted in Cikovsky, “Whistler and America,” 30.

 7. “Whistler and His Ways,” New York Times, March 22, 1885; William C. Brownell, 

“The Paris Exposition, Notes and Impressions,” Scribner’s Monthly, January 1890, 34 

(both as quoted in Cikovsky, “Whistler and America,” 30, 31).

 8. Henry James to Thomas Sargeant Perry, September 20, 1867, in Henry James: Letters, 

ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 1: 77.

 9. The MFA’s collection of Whistlers includes six paintings, almost 300 prints, one cancelled plate, several illustrated books, three drawings, one watercolor, and a letter; 

it is by no means comprehensive, but it is very fi ne. For this essay, I have chosen to 

focus on the paintings alone, as the history of their display within the institution has 

been more completely recorded.

 10. Perry T. Rathbone to George E. Dix Jr., October 18, 1960, Archives, Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston.

 11. For a detailed history of the museum, see Walter Muir Whitehill, Museum of Fine 

Arts, Boston: A Centennial History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970). Further information about the appearance and arrangement of 

the paintings galleries over the course of the twentieth century can be found in the 

MFA’s annual reports and in a variety of published handbooks of the collection; see, 

for example, Julia de Wolf Addison, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Boston: L. C. 

Page, 1910).

 12. Hilton Kramer, “Art View: England’s Glory: The Country House,” New York Times, 

November 3, 1985. The National Gallery’s exhibition designers were Gaillard Ravenel 

and Mark Leithauser. See Gervase Jackson-Stops, The Treasure Houses of Britain: 

500 Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 1985).

 13. A complete description of the project is beyond the scope of this paper; I am grateful to Elliot Bostwick Davis for her helpful review of my brief account. For more details about the planning and execution of the MFA’s new galleries, see Elliot Bostwick 

Davis, “Communicating through Design and Display: The New American Wing at the 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” in Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums 

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50 Palaces of Art

and Sustainable Values, ed. Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Álvarez (Lanham, MD: Altamira 

Press, 2009), 182–85; Davis, “The Art of the Americas Wing. Museum of Fine Arts, 

Boston,” American Art 24 (Summer 2010): 9–11; Davis, “Breaking Ground in Boston,” 

Magazine Antiques 177 (November–December 2010): 124–33. See also Ted Loos, 

“Mix Masters,” Art and Antiques 33 (November 2010): 84. 

 14. The curators from the Department of Art of the Americas who planned the Aesthetic movement gallery were Elliot Bostwick Davis, John Moors Cabot Chair, and 

Eleanor P. Gadsden, now Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of American Decorative Arts. The designer was Keith Crippen.

 15. Accession number 2008.1501; the fi replace was the gift of Jan and Warren Adelson. 

For a history of the house in which it once was installed, see “196 Commonwealth 

Avenue,” BOSarchitecture, http://www.bosarchitecture.com/backbay/commonwealth/196.html (accessed May 12, 2013).

 16. Whistler to John Humphreys Johnston, [June–October 1894?], GUW 09176; Whistler to Richard A. Canfi eld, April 19, 1902, GUW 09044.

 17. James to Perry, September 20, 1867, in Henry James: Letters, 1: 77 .

 18. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 14.

 19. Freer to Thomas Dewing, December 12, 1902, Letterpress Books 10: 22, FGAA, as 

quoted in Glazer, “Whistler, America, and the Memorial Exhibition of 1904,” 88.

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Inside the Palace of Art: Whistler’s Aesthetic SubjectivitiesWhistlerBook.indb 53 WhistlerBook.indb 53 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Subject and Object in Whistler: 

The Context of Physiological 

Aesthetics

Caroline Arscott

I

n Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely 

Alexander (Figure 1), we see the solemn and, 

according to more than one reviewer, bilious 

pose of the eight-year-old sitter.1 Whistler’s 

mother recounted how cold and rainy the season was and how miserably dark the days were; 

Cicely posed for hours at a time; meanwhile, 

her lunch was being kept warm in the plate 

warmer by the fi re. Her own mother quietly 

passed the time crocheting, and Anna Whistler 

spoke in November 1872 of what a relief it 

would be for the sittings to come to an end so 

that the Alexanders did not have to make the 

twice-weekly journey to Cheyne Walk on those 

“short dark days.” The gloomy days affected 

Anna Whistler’s eyesight; she struggled to keep 

up her letter writing, telling one correspondent, “Darkness thro incessant rains makes it 

diffi cult for my sight.”2 Cicely herself tells of 

the strain of posing and of her relief when the 

“blessed black fog came up from the river,” 

invading the studio and making it impossible 

for Whistler to continue with his work.3

 The 

topic of this essay includes that cold London 

fog hanging over the river, shrouding the forms 

of the city, spilling into places of habitation, and 

occluding the artist’s vision. 

Fog—in its clammy contact with the body’s 

various sense organs and its occlusion of distant 

vision—will help me to make an argument 

about the relationship of Whistler’s artistic 

mode to the positions taken up by the physiological aestheticists. I will argue that Whistler’s 

works were concerned with duration as much 

as instantaneity and spatiality rather than fl atFIGURE 1. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Grey and Green: 

Miss Cicely Alexander, 1872–74. Oil on canvas, 190.2 × 97.8 cm. 

Tate Britain, London. © Tate, London 2012.

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56 Palaces of Art

ness.4 Both fi ndings might be seen to offer an alternative perspective to the more familiar 

modernist emphasis on evanescence and fl atness in Whistler’s art. I identify the close 

alignment between Whistler’s approach to aesthetic experience and the concept of aesthetic experience proposed by the physiological aestheticists of the 1870s. Whistler was 

concerned with reciprocal object-subject issues in terms set out by physiological psychologists. Furthermore, his work was primitivist in its evocation of fundamental aspects of 

perception and being and was concerned with the correlative relationship of extension in 

time and extension in space as grounds of being 

and experience.

The visual effects of Whistler’s Thames 

views of the 1870s—his Nocturnes, where 

detail is lost in a murky half-light—were associated with London fog, whether or not he explicitly depicted fog (Figure 2).5

 The Illustrated 

Review as early as 1873 urged Whistler to 

move on from the topic, to realize that there 

was more to nature than “a grey fog on the 

Thames.”6 The Magazine of Art in 1878 identifi ed Whistler’s three cityscapes in the Grosvenor Gallery exhibition as “clever renderings 

of various effects of London fog,” including 

a fl oating bank of smoke over the river, but 

went on to object that London’s polluted atmosphere was not the place to fi nd beauty and 

the desirable “tone” of nature: in smoke (and 

London fog), all that could be found was “the 

poor and grimy darkness of soot.”7

The phenomenon was much discussed. The 

chill water of the Thames and certain anticyclonic conditions routinely produced a layer of 

fog over the river as daylight faded. This layer 

did occasionally mass up, rising to street level or 

above, producing a major meteorological event. 

The Graphic in 1872 (Figure 3) distinguished between various kinds of fog, identifying the very 

worst kind: “so thick that a man cannot see the 

horse that he is driving.”8

 Danger in travel and 

disruption to trade was accompanied by danger 

to health. The fogs of the city smelled of coal 

smoke, sludge, and sulphur; tasted foul; brought 

on coughs and asthmatic attacks; and made the 

eyes sting due to “gases and vapours produced 

by the combustion of fuel, [whence] ... the 

atmosphere is charged with carbon, sulphurous, 

nitrous and pyroligneous acids.”9 The fi res of 

industrial establishments and private homes 

poured particles of tar and carbon into the atFIGURE 2. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Gold—

Old Battersea Bridge, ca. 1872–75. Oil on canvas, 68.3 × 51.2 

cm. Tate Britain, London. © Tate, London 2012.

FIGURE 3. The Graphic, November 9, 1872, 431. © British Library 

Board (British Newspapers, 1800–1900).

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Subject and Object in Whistler 57

mosphere, which infi ltrated the cloud and coated the droplets of water, creating a peculiar 

fog, yellow or black in color and oily when touched.

If the subject of a photographic portrait was obscured by fog hanging in the room, 

then the requisite portrait simply could not be made. On the other hand, a cartoon in 

Fun slyly suggests that some clients would be better photographed in the fog.10 The same 

might be said for the industrial jumble of the Battersea shoreline, which Whistler beautifi ed by rendering it repeatedly in the restricted light of evening, the indistinct forms 

evoking the effect of mist or fog on the Thames (Figure 4). Thomas Escott, who was to 

take on the role of editor of the Fortnightly Review, saw Whistler’s Nocturnes in 1879 as 

taking advantage of the aestheticizing aspect of fog: “It cannot be denied that they have 

a copious measure of suggestive poetry. The dim gleam of lamps, like gold and red stars 

through mist, idealising the effect of a London river fog—surely this is poetry; such poetry as any of us can see any day if we look for it.”11 This comment is published in a journal, which is important as a locus of avant-garde cultural positions and advanced scientifi c 

thinking, as I will go on to discuss. The Athenaeum reviewer (possibly William Michael 

Rossetti) commented similarly in 1876 on the naturalistic underpinnings of Whistler’s 

“moonlight and fog studies,” seeing the two works at the Deschamps Gallery that year 

as not just studies in color and tone of subtle quality and not just Art for Art’s Sake, but 

faithful representations of nature: nature seen afresh in the selection of unusual effects, 

rather than conventionally rendered.12

London fogs were notorious for their 

nastiness and for their beauty. Jonathan Ribner 

wrote in 2004 of the way that the meteorological phenomenon became imaginatively linked 

with the British metropolis: visitors expected 

to see a real London fog; artists such as Monet 

came specifi cally to paint fog effects.13 A host of 

writers from Dickens onward, including Arthur 

Symons and Henry James, characterized London by its fog.14 An extreme case such as that of 

December 1879 saw the papers describing the 

“yellow gloom” in which visibility was reduced 

to 3 yards (3.67 m) on the Strand and locomotion slowed to “a creeping pace.”15 On this 

occasion the Daily News allowed that with the 

fl are of torches and lanterns and the glimmer of 

gas lamps showing up in the “thick darkness,” 

there was an aesthetic effect: “Viewed merely 

as a fog this latest fog was artistically perfect.”16

It has been understood that the Nocturnes, for all their exquisite compositions 

of tone and color, never fully relinquish the 

description of actual locale (Figure 5). This 

paradox has exercised art historians, many of 

whom have rightly emphasized the geographical specifi cs, whether of Battersea, Cremorne, 

Chelsea, or Westminster, that persist in WhisFIGURE 4. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver—

Battersea Reach, ca. 1872–78. Oil on canvas, 39.4 × 62.9 cm. 

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. © Isabella Stewart 

Gardner Museum, Boston, MA / Bridgeman Art Library.

FIGURE 5. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver—

Cremorne Lights, 1872. Oil on canvas, 502 × 743 mm. Tate 

Britain, London. © Tate, London 2012.

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58 Palaces of Art

tler’s formalized renditions. John Siewert, for instance, has summed up the balance 

maintained by Whistler between the description of an encounter with a geographically 

specifi c nocturnal landscape and the dissipation or dissolution of the locale in pure 

color and form.17 If we return to the comments of the Athenaeum reviewer, we fi nd 

that he uses the term “objective” for the vast majority of naturalistic art (“representing with certain necessary conventions of the art, the subjects chosen by the painters 

as they refer to nature in a more or less exact or comprehensive way”), reserving 

the term “subjective” for Art for Art’s Sake’s prioritization of color, tone, and shape, 

where the exigencies of the composition determine the elements.18 Where a motif was 

deemed ugly and incompetently drawn, as in Whistler’s Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The 

Gold Girl—Connie Gilchrist (Figure 6), reviewed in the Athenaeum in 1879, these demerits, it was stated, belonged to its 

“objective character.” However, in 

the very same picture, the color 

harmony could be “a beautiful illustration of certain principles of chromatic art, of which Mr. Whistler is 

still the leading prophet.”19 In this 

schema, drawing and the referent 

belong to the objective, whereas 

color and abstract values belong to 

the subjective. 

The Athenaeum reviewer had 

recourse to terms familiar from 

the context of philosophy and the 

fi eld of philosophical psychology, 

which was particularly strong in 

Britain in the 1870s.20 In the case 

of the moonlight and fog studies, 

he fi nds that Whistler’s art, which 

seems subjective, should by rights be 

acknowledged as objective by virtue 

of its fi delity to elements of natural 

light and weather—conditions not 

routinely approached by artists. In 

the case of Harmony in Yellow and 

Gold, which it is pointed out “is also 

called Portrait of Miss Connie Gilchrist,”

the critic fi nds that the work, like 

the title, has two aspects: it is both 

subjective and objective. The way in 

which he puts Whistler’s art at the 

junction between these two terms is 

signifi cant since the terms were being 

negotiated by philosophically inclined, 

anti-idealist psychologists of the 

1870s. Key thinkers included AlexanFIGURE 6. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Yellow and Gold: 

The Gold Girl—Connie Gilchrist, 1876–77. Oil on canvas, 217.8 

× 109.5 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of 

George A. Hearn, 1911 (11.32). Image © Metropolitan Museum 

of Art / Art Resource, NY / Scala, Florence.

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Subject and Object in Whistler 59

der Bain, Herbert Spencer, Henry Maudsley, George Henry Lewes, and James Sully. Bain’s 

The Emotions and the Will (1859) was in its third edition in 1875; Spencer’s The Principles of 

Psychology (1855) was in its second edition in 1873. Maudsley’s The Physiology and Pathology 

of the Mind appeared in 1868, giving rise to reviews that surveyed the fi eld of “physiological 

psychology.”21 Lewes’s Problems of Life and Mind was published in fi ve volumes from 1874 to 

1879, the last two volumes being posthumous. James Sully, author of Sensation and Intuition

(1874) and Outlines of Psychology (1881), was one of Lewes’s literary executors. The periodical press in the 1870s paid close attention to debates between different camps in the 

emergent fi eld of psychology. The Academy, the Contemporary Review, the Quarterly Review, 

the Saturday Review, the Athenaeum, the Westminster Review, as well as Mind, Nature, and the 

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, all published detailed discussions of the publications of these 

authors.22

The Fortnightly Review was an important vehicle for cultural avant-gardism in the late 

1860s and 1870s, as well as for advanced scientifi c thinking. In that journal in the 1870s, 

detailed assessment of the empiricist dispute with Kant’s account of subject and object 

and key texts for physiological aesthetics such as James Sully’s essays on sensation and 

musical form sat alongside reviews by Sidney Colvin, poems by Algernon Charles Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and reviews of London art exhibitions. The visibility of 

physiological aesthetics in the cultural nexus that Whistler occupied is easily established, 

even if we do not have evidence of his reading in this area. The journals give us evidence 

that scientifi c and philosophical issues were not sectioned off from other cultural debates. If nothing else, we can be certain that Whistler accessed the journals and read the 

art reviews vigilantly, looking for slights in his paranoid manner.23

A general shift in psychology took place from midcentury, with the emergence of a 

strong current of physiologically based investigation that challenged metaphysical assumptions about the mind—above all the idea that the mind and the body were separate 

entities. The focus of physiological psychology was on the bodily nervous system and the 

organism as a processor of sensory stimuli. This was a study of the mind that focused on 

embodiment and corporeal reception of information from the environment. It traced the 

processing ability of the human mind back to the reactions observable in all life forms, 

even the most primitive, and owed much to the impact of Herbert Spencer and Charles 

Darwin.24 Biological entities, it was argued, have the urge for self-conservation, so there 

is movement in response to the stimulus—“protrusion” in response to the benefi cial 

stimulus or aversion from the injurious. Sensibility is taken to be a vital property of tissue 

(in plants and in animal life). Examples include the refl ex closure of a leaf when the hairs 

of a sensitive plant are touched or the sensitivity of the human eye. Lewes discusses the 

commonality between plant and animal:

The structure of the plant differs from that of the animal in 

many and important details, with corresponding differences in 

properties and functions; it also agrees in certain fundamental 

points, namely, in a ground substance of protoplasm, and a 

cellular confi guration of elements. As we are now disregarding 

differences, we seek in the cells and protoplasm for the 

conditions of Sensibility in both.25

Sensibility is traced back to the common denominators of cellular structure and protoplasmic substance, which ensure the vital qualities in both plant and animal.

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60 Palaces of Art

Physiological psychologists were particularly interested in the mental phenomena 

that could be classed as perception or ideation and the neural process undergone as 

stimulus led on to perception. This could be conceived of in organisms where there was 

a degree of coordination and a centralized neural structure; Lewes suggested that even 

mollusks might be credited with subjectivity in these terms.26

James Sully reported on optical experiments on the persistence of the image, where a 

viewer saw gray instead of rapidly alternating black and white; the viewer’s tendency to see 

gray was tested in different light conditions—daylight, candlelight, and moonlight. The time 

span of the alternation necessary for gray to be perceived was found to vary. By moonlight 

the alternation could be much slower; the afterimpression of black or white lasted much 

longer.27 The explanation was couched in terms of the exhaustion of the nerve under more 

intense light, and lesser exhaustion in limited light. Anesthesia of the nerves could occur 

where there was overstimulation through bright light, extreme temperature, or harsh 

spices; as a corollary, hyperesthesia could be observed in cases of understimulation: nerve 

fi bers became highly excitable. Colored afterimpressions were observed to vary according 

to color, blue lasting longer than red or yellow. The explanation was sought in the different molecular structure of the nerve fi bers in the retina serving blue, red, and yellow. The 

ability to discriminate between sensations was studied, and the threshold of perception of a 

sound, a light, or a pinprick was carefully quantifi ed.28

The physiological psychologists leaned on these kinds of empiricist investigations 

to show that fundamental organic responsiveness and properties of the nerve fi bers 

underlay all perception. Subjectivity was defi ned in these discussions as the coordination of the various body parts through the gray matter in the brain, spinal column, and 

ganglionic centers alike, throughout the nervous system. Equally, the coordination of the 

fi ve senses, it was claimed, always attended perception. In other words, the coordinated 

sensorium was said to be necessary for perception. Instances of optical or auditory hallucination, synesthetic perception, and memory were referenced to show that perception 

requires the coordination offered by the sensorium.29 Subjectivity was crucial in these 

arguments, but the case was strongly made that subjectivity did not relate to the brain as 

an isolated locus of mental experience. Rejecting the kind of binarism that located objectivity in the body and subjectivity in the mind, the physiological psychologists also refuted 

the idea that will and advanced intellect were essential to subjectivity.30 In their view, 

any higher organism objectively received stimuli from the environment and subjectively 

had psychic experience in perceiving the stimuli. Each was the fl ip side of the other: the 

subject gave onto the object; the object brought the subject into being.31

Aesthetic response was argued to be at base, as Sully put it, regarding timbre and 

harmony in music, “favourable mode[s] of nervous stimulation.” Pleasure in discrete 

tones came from “the even regularity of sequent molecular movements of a nervous 

fi bre [in the ear].”32 Beyond this substratum of sensuous gratifi cation, aesthetic pleasure 

could be made more complex as musical elements were combined and the mind’s ability 

to assess resemblance came into play, allowing higher intellectual faculties to be engaged. 

Psychologists differed in the way they apportioned automatic and conscious or reasoned 

responses, but the physiological psychologists agreed on the fundamentally embodied 

nature of perception. Experience was therefore understood by them to be both objective and subjective. 

Henry James, in an essay of 1888, wrote about the London atmosphere, registering it 

as the beautiful and inescapable condition of life in the metropolis: “the magnifi cent thick 

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Subject and Object in Whistler 61

medium of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in general, the strangely 

undefi ned hour of the day and season of the year, the emanations of industries and the 

refl ection of furnaces ... hang together.”33 Friendly with Whistler by this date, it is likely 

that James had Whistler’s Nocturnes (Figure 7) in mind as he wrote various passages in 

this essay, as well as an earlier one of 1877 on the squalor of the Battersea waterfront as 

seen from Chelsea and the peculiarity of the atmosphere, “with its magnifi cent mystifi cations, which fl atters and superfuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, magnifi es 

distances and minimises details, confi rms the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as 

the great city makes everything, it makes its own system of weather.”34

Henry James’s “inference of vastness” can be read in parallel with the investigation 

of spatiality by physiological psychologists, notably his own brother William James, in the 

late 1870s and early 1880s. William James, an important young psychologist emerging 

to notice in the late 1870s, went even further than Sully in refuting a dualism between 

mind and body. Moving on from the investigation of the specifi c physiological aspects of 

the fi ve senses, the coordination of senses—that crucial ground of subjectivity—was 

approached by studies on time and space. The sensorium embraced all discrete sense 

impressions (touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight) and had to be understood in terms of 

the double parameters of time and space. Lewes commented on the need to see “each 

discrete instantaneous reaction in something broader temporally, understood as Experience.”35 The psychological aspect of time and space were, respectively, memory and 

the sense of spatiality. Whistler’s own memory procedures in making his Nocturnes, the 

slowing down of visual perception in low-light conditions, the issues of persistence of visual impression (we can think about sparks actually or apparently hanging in the sky), are 

all relevant to a psychophysiological account of experience.36 We can think of his selected 

subjects as experimental setups to investigate subjective experience at its limit points. 

In fogbound London, where life slowed down to a crawling pace, stimuli impinged on the 

subject in clammy skin, prickling eyes, tarry taste, sulfurous smell, muffl ed sounds, and an 

FIGURE 7. James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Grey and Silver, ca. 1875–80. Oil on canvas, 31.1 × 51.8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

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62 Palaces of Art

optical phenomenon of proximate colored clouds, offering a kind of sensory deprivation 

that gave way to multisensory hyperesthesia. 

As a fi nal suggestion, I wish to attend to spatiality as the essential correlate of memory or temporality. Lewes suggests that time (in terms of memory, habit, culture, and 

experience) is proper to the psyche, whereas space (in terms of bodily volume and environmental extensiveness) is proper to the body. But, of course, his underlying argument 

was for continuity between mind and body, for interchangeability between subject and 

object. According to Lewes, memory guides the psyche into certain defi ned pathways; 

narrowing and selection result. The extensiveness of the body and its existence in space, 

on the other hand, allow for what Lewes calls the irradiation of stimuli from one particular sense organ into the sensorium; expansion and inclusiveness result. Approaching the 

issue in a slightly different way, William James, in his essay of 1879, “The Spatial Quale,” 

asserts that there is a basic sensory apprehension of space that predates ideas of measurement, local differentiation, and relative distances: “In the individual’s psychic history 

the sensation, space, as a simple vague consciousness of vastness, comes fi rst.” All the 

senses are capable of registering space directly; staring into an empty blue sky, the eye 

conveys its spaciousness; this capability is linked to the subject’s apprehension of his or 

her own bodily extensiveness. James gives the example of a fetus bathed in amniotic 

fl uid, “feeling its total vastness without discerning positions therein.”37 Apprehension of 

spatiality is being proposed, therefore, as a primordial supersense: primal both in terms 

of the individual’s development and in the evolutionary development of organic life. 

The foggy or gloomy unifi cation of the pictorial composition achieved by Whistler—

almost devoid of points of measurement and differentiation—references, I suggest, a 

spatial quale that gives on to its object, the extensiveness of London, and its subject, the 

sensate being. This being is capable of sensory gratifi cation, and therefore aesthetic experience, through the favorable excitation of the nervous system. It is sensate experience 

free from what Whistler called the “cunning condition of mind that requires to know.”38

The arguments emerging in physiological psychology in the 1870s make it important that 

we attend to these intimations of environmental and bodily space alongside the issues of 

temporality in Whistler’s art. 

Notes

 1. Exhibited in Mr. Whistler’s Exhibition, Flemish Gallery, 48 Pall Mall, June 1874; comments assembled by Whistler in The Gentle Art, 314. See Punch’s critique on “An 

Arrangement in Silver and Bile,” June 25, 1881, when Harmony in Grey and Green was 

exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1881 (catalogue no. 113).

 2. Anna Matilda Whistler to James H. Gamble, November 5 and 22, 1872, GUW 

06553.

 3. Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, rev. 

ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1911), 1:205.

 4. The term “spatiality” is used in a somewhat specialized sense in nineteenth-century 

psychology. See note 37.

 5. Whistler’s titles do not usually reference fog. A notable exception is A Winter Fog (ca. 

1876, whereabouts unknown; YMSM 161), exhibition of the Society of French Artists, New Bond Street, Deschamps Gallery, 1876 (catalogue no. 149). The multitude 

of comments from the period about Whistler’s foggy effects are countered by an 

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Subject and Object in Whistler 63

odd remark in the Standard, clearly referencing Whistler’s titles, that many painters 

“delight in the fl eecy cloud,” which is, scientifi cally speaking, “a close relative to the 

dirty black or yellow London fog,” but that painters are nevertheless neglectful of 

the fog: “No ‘Arrangement in Yellow and Black’ has been adjusted to perpetuate its 

ugliness.” “London Fogs,” Standard, February 3, 1880, 6.

 6. “Dudley Gallery,” Illustrated Review, November 1873, 380. 

 7. “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Magazine of Art, 1878, 51. 

 8. The journalist describes fog that sits above street level—covering the city with “a 

mantle varying in tint from pea soup colour to inky black,” referencing the extreme 

darkness on Lord Mayor’s Day of two years earlier—and another type of very thick 

fog, rarer but more dangerous, that “generally comes on after sunset ... usually 

lighter in colour; ... [that] descends to the level of the ground.” “A November Fog in 

London,” Graphic, November 9, 1872, 431. 

 9. “London and Its Fogs,” Morning Post, December 25, 1873, 2, quoting from the Builder. 

See R. Russell, Preventable Causes of Impurity in London Air (London, 1880). Mortality rates rose alarmingly during the foggy weeks. The British Architect noted Signor 

Giuliano’s scheme to install a shaft for ventilation in London houses, surmounted by 

a large fan to disperse the fog. The idea was that fi fty or one hundred thousand of 

these in operation would remove the problem and shift “any amount of fog.” “Notes 

on Current Events,” British Architect, December 3, 1880, 236.

 10. “The Artist,” Fun, January 18, 1862, 182: “Lor! Bless yer, Mim. Fog aint of no consequence. You’ll make a sweet picter, mim. Your’n is one of them hinteresting faces 

wot wants to be a little subdooed.” Anecdotes of life in photographic studios tell of 

“fog days,” when the entire operation would shut down; any clients coming to be 

photographed were turned away because of insuffi cient light. Advertising columns 

for stereoscopic studios note that equipment was excellent but that even the best 

studios could not cope with terrible days such as the great fog day of January 18, 

1878. “Spinnings in Town,” Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion, March 1, 1878, 56. One 

reminiscence tells of “a terrible November morning, with a yellow fog, and of course 

a dies non for the photographic artist,” when the photographer has to meet the fury 

of the client who expects to be photographed as arranged, expostulating, “Surely 

Mrs Jarncey was aware that fog put a stop to photography!” Wyvern [Arthur Robert 

Kenney Herbert], Furlough Reminiscences: A Potpourri of Refl ections, Observations and 

Incidents, Compiled from the Diary of a Happy Holiday in England (London, 1880), 275.

 11. Thomas Hay Sweet Escott, England: Its People, Polity and Pursuits (London, 1879), discussing the merits of the Grosvenor Gallery and the Aesthetic school despite some 

elements considered to be evidence of affectation, such as Whistler’s titles. Omitted 

from quotation: “The shower of sparks from a burning house thrown on the dark 

sky of night.” Escott was editor of the Fortnightly Review from 1882 to 1886; he was 

also Edmund Yates’s deputy editor at the World from the mid-1870s to 1886. See 

also the comment from the Daily News selected by Whistler for The Gentle Art: “We 

think that London fogs and the muddy old Thames supply Mr. Whistler’s needle with 

subjects more convenient than do the Venetian palaces and lagoons” (96).

12. “The Royal Academy (Third Notice),” Athenaeum, May 13, 1876, 671. 

 13. Jonathan Ribner, “The Poetics of Pollution,” in Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist 

Visions, ed. Katharine Lochnan (London: Tate Publishing in association with the Art 

Gallery of Ontario, 2004), 51–63. When tinted spectacles were discussed, one 

option alongside green or rose tinted was a shade of yellow known as “London fog,” 

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64 Palaces of Art

which gives an idea of the broad recognition of the visual experience of negotiating 

the metropolis transformed by fog. “Scraps,” Graphic, February 8, 1873, 123. 

 14. Nicholas Freeman, Conceiving the City: London Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 2007), 90–99.

 15. “Dense Fog in London,” York Herald, December 27, 1879, 3. When the fog was at its 

thickest, link boys would offer their services to guide pedestrians with fl aming rope 

torches, cabmen would have to lead their horses, and fatalities ensued from collisions and from pedestrians plunging mistakenly into the river. “The Fog in London,” 

Graphic, December 13, 1873, 554, reports four drownings and the asphyxiation of 

cattle at the Islington Show as a result of the fog.

 16. “London, Tuesday, Dec. 23,” Daily News, December 23, 1879, 5.

 17. John Siewert, “Art, Music, and an Aesthetics of Place in Whistler’s Nocturne Paintings,” in Turner, Whistler, Monet, 147. 

 18. “The Royal Academy (Third Notice),” Athenaeum, May 13, 1876, 671. 

 19. “The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition (Second and Concluding Notice),” Athenaeum, 

May 10, 1879, 607. Here Whistler was said to go beyond “the ‘impressionists,’ who 

delight in reproducing crude impressions of commonplace facts, without art and 

without harmony.”

 20. See Robert M. Young, Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1970); Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of 

Neuroscientifi c Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Rick Rylance, 

Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 

2000).

 21. Gilbert Child, “Physiological Psychology,” Westminster Review, n.s., 33 (1866): 63, 

discussed in Rylance, Victorian Psychology, 226–27.

22. Throughout Victorian Psychology and British Culture, Rylance undertakes a fascinating 

discussion of the debates and reviews published in the periodical press.

 23. In 1885 the Fortnightly Review carried a positive article by Theodore Child, and the 

New York Sun published a more critical one by him: Whistler was enraged, as he was 

when Swinburne wrote critically about him in the Fortnightly Review in 1888.

 24. George Henry Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 3rd ser., vol. 2, Problem the Second: 

Mind as a Function of the Organism; Problem the Third: The Sphere of Sense and the Logic 

of Feeling; Problem the Fourth: The Sphere of Intellect and the Logic of Signs (Boston: 

Houghton Osgood, 1880), 93–94: “Mr. Spencer in many luminous pages expressed 

the rational view of the evolution of mind.” Lewes, the life partner of the novelist 

George Eliot and a prominent member of the London intelligentsia, was editor of the 

Fortnightly Review from 1865 to 1867.

 25. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:22–23. Lewes excludes inorganic matter from 

possession of sensibility, rejecting the argument that irritability can be found in, for 

example, minerals.

 26. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:38–39. 

 27. James Sully, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (London: Kegan Paul, 1880), 40–41. Helmholtz, Fechner, and Wundt are cited. Sully fi rst 

published Sensation and Intuition in 1874, collecting a number of his periodical articles 

and giving a roundup of investigations into the mental processing of sensation.

WhistlerBook.indb 64 WhistlerBook.indb 64 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Subject and Object in Whistler 65

 28. Sully, “Recent German Experiments with Sensation,” in Sensation and Intuition, 38–72.

 29. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:72–73.

 30. Lorraine J. Daston, “British Responses to Psycho-Physiology,” Isis 69, no. 2 (June 

1978): 192–208. Daston quotes Henry Maudsley from The Physiology of Mind (London, 1876), 49, on the challenge posed by “the continuity of nature” to “the absolute 

and unholy barrier set up between physical and psychical nature.”

 31. Daston, “British Responses to Psycho-Physiology,” discusses the debates about the 

role to be given to will and the degree to which the different theorists maintained 

that there was continuity between mind and body. Sully, for all his infl uence in establishing arguments about the aesthetic in this context, was (according to Daston) 

committed to maintaining a mind-body distinction (202). 

 32. Sully, Sensation and Intuition, 169. Sully bases his analysis of sensation on an explanation of the theories of Helmholtz on pleasure and nervous stimulation; see note 28.

 33. Henry James, “London,” Century 37, no. 2 (December 1888): 223, republished in 

Henry James, English Hours (Boston: Houghton, Miffl in, and Co., 1905). The fog’s 

thickness is linked in this passage to the compendious “see-everything: fi nd-everything” reputation of the city. For an interesting discussion of the blackness of 

fog as described by James in relation to poverty and the immensity of the imperial 

city, see Brigitte Bailey, “Travel Writing and the Metropolis: James, London, and 

English Hours,” American Literature 67, no. 2 (June 1995): 201–32, esp. 209, 216–18. 

Nicholas Freeman points out James’s reference to Robert Browning’s “Andrea del 

Sarto” (“There’s what we painters call our harmony! / A common greyness silvers 

everything,— / All in a twilight, you and I alike”) and makes useful points about the 

separate senses evoked in sequence ending in vision in the 1877 essay. Freeman, 

Conceiving the City, 92. 

 34. Bailey, “Travel Writing,” 225. Henry James, “London at Midsummer,” fi rst published 

in Lippincott’s Magazine, November 1877, subsequently in Portraits of Places (London, 

1883).

 35. Lewes, Problems of Life and Mind, 2:41. 

 36. The alteration of the rhythm of the city as everything slows to a crawling pace in 

foggy or misty nighttime conditions can be seen as an experimental instance with 

regard to temporality.

 37. William James, “The Spatial Quale,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 13, no. 1 (January 

1879): 77. I thank Vanessa Ryan of Brown University for pointing out this predecessor to William James’s 1880s essays on spatiality in Mind. 

 38. Whistler’s marginal “refl ection” on the testimony of Edward Burne-Jones in Whistler v. Ruskin: “There is a cunning condition of mind that requires to know. On the 

Stock Exchange this ensures safe investment. In the painting trade this would induce 

certain picture-makers to cross the river at noon, in a boat, before negotiating a 

Nocturne, in order to make sure of detail on the bank, that honestly the purchaser 

might exact, and out of which he might have been tricked by Night!” (Whistler, The 

Gentle Art, 172). In terms of intimations of spatiality, Whistler may be said to have 

crossed the river without securing knowledge beyond generalized perception.

WhistlerBook.indb 65 WhistlerBook.indb 65 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler’s Peacock Room and 

the Artist as Magus

Sally-Anne Huxtable

J

ames McNeill Whistler’s Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room (Figure 1) has 

become such a familiar feature of the terrain of Victorian aestheticism that it has 

often been taken for granted, lost in the reiteration of the scandals that followed in 

its wake like the trailing tail feathers of Whistler’s own rendering. Instead of reiterating 

the well-known saga surrounding the creation of the room, this discussion will refl ect 

upon the decoration itself, arguing that it functions as an expression of Whistler’s selfconsciously created artistic identity as magus and his ideas about the nature of artistic 

creation. Nevertheless, it is not only the stories and the history but also the unashamed 

spectacle of the Peacock Room that obfuscates the debates that the artist used the room 

to explore—specifi cally, ideas regarding the role of the artist, the function of art, the 

relationship between art and nature, and the ancient concept of the artist as magician, an 

individual who somehow has the power to improve on nature itself.1

It is pertinent here to remember the original proximity of the Peacock Room, 

at 49 Prince’s Gate, to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert), 

home to the Green Dining Room (Figure 2). Created ten years earlier, the Green 

Dining Room not only launched 

a thousand Aesthetic green and 

dadoed interiors but also functioned as a celebration of communal artistic endeavor, a utopian 

dream of the act of creation as a 

shared undertaking and a paean to 

the “green world” of the English 

countryside. It was a very public 

space expressing the idealistic 

manifesto of William Morris, 

Edward Burne-Jones, and Philip 

Webb—their shared belief that 

design could transform people’s 

lives for the better.2 The similarities between the Green Dining 

Room and the Peacock Room are 

undeniable: both were created in 

South Kensington, both are dining 

rooms, gorgeous with green-blue 

FIGURE 1. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock 

Room, 1876–77. Oil paint and gold leaf on canvas, leather, and wood, 421.6 × 

613.4 × 1026.2 cm (overall). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.

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68 Palaces of Art

and gold, and both have somehow 

survived to the present day. It seems 

likely that Whistler noted this proximity and that the Peacock Room 

was, in part, created as a response 

to the artistic ideas expressed in the 

Green Dining Room. Just as Morris, 

Marshall, Faulkner & Co. used their 

dining room to display their ideas 

about art as a communal practice, 

Whistler saw the opportunity to 

create his own artistic statement in 

the shape of a room which, contrary 

to the vision made manifest in the 

Green Dining Room, articulated Aestheticism as a very individual form of 

artistic practice. It is my contention 

that this work went beyond Whistler’s initial intention to complete 

and improve on a decorative scheme 

by Thomas Jeckyll in order to complement his painting La Princesse du 

pays de la porcelaine (see Deusner, 

Figure 2). At some point during the 

process of its creation, the room 

became more than a decorative 

interior. It became a visual representation of the concerns that were 

particularly troubling Whistler during 

the 1870s. These were the tensions between the spiritual and material aspects of art—

that is, the need for Whistler to reconcile the seemingly constant confl ict between the 

desire for unfettered artistic creativity and the requirement to earn enough money to 

have shelter and put bread on the table.

To analyze the meaning of the Peacock Room in these terms is, admittedly, resolutely un-Whistlerian. In the Ten O’Clock lecture Whistler berates those, particularly John 

Ruskin, who attempt to unpick and decipher, and then give narrative and ethical import 

to, every work of art: 

For him a picture is more or less a hieroglyph or symbol of a 

story. Apart from a few technical terms, for the display of which 

he fi nds an occasion, the work is considered absolutely from a 

literary point of view; indeed, from what other can he consider 

it? And in his essays he deals with it as a novel—a history—or 

an anecdote. He fails entirely and most naturally to see its 

excellences, or demerits—artistic—and so degrades Art, by 

supposing it a method of bringing about a literary climax.3

Despite his claims to the contrary, Whistler’s oeuvre cannot be perceived as inhabiting some beautiful void. Where Whistler does draw on narratives, intellectual ideas, and 

FIGURE 2. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., The Green Dining 

Room (Morris Room), designed by Phillip Webb, 1866–67. © 

Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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The Artist as Magus 69

inspirations, he purposely obfuscates these 

sources, hiding them as a form of artistic 

secret knowledge. Though he claims that 

meaning, narrative, and moral conclusions 

cannot be applied to his art, Whistler’s L’Art 

et L’Argent (or Art and Money; Figure 3), a 

panel that vividly depicts the spat between 

the artist and his patron Frederick Richards 

Leyland, as well as his 1879 depiction of 

Leyland in The Gold Scab: Eruption in Filthy 

Lucre (Figure 4), cannot be brushed aside as 

amoral, nonnarrative works of art that are 

nothing but beautiful compositions. Indeed, 

it must always be remembered that Whistler, like so many of us, often said one thing 

and did another. In this regard, his work, 

although profoundly serious, can sometimes 

be read as purposely mischievous, as his 

choice of a signature—a fl itting, metamorphic butterfl y (and later one with a sting in 

its tail)—constantly reminds us. 

Whistler’s art is about the immediacy 

of aesthetic sensory experience: his aesthetic philosophy, as expressed in the Ten O’Clock lecture of 1885, was highly infl uenced 

by the articulation of multisensory aesthetic experience in the essays of Walter Pater, 

such as “Poems by William Morris” (1868), the work that later became the infamous conFIGURE 3. James McNeill Whistler, L’Art et L’Argent; or, the Story of the Room. Detail of Harmony in Blue and 

Gold: The Peacock Room. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, 

F1904.61.

FIGURE 4. James McNeill Whistler, The Gold Scab: 

Eruption in Fr ilthy Lucre (The Creditor), 1879. Oil on 

canvas, 186.7 × 139.7 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San 

Francisco. Gift of Mrs. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels 

through the Patrons of Art and Music, 1977.11.

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70 Palaces of Art

clusion to The Renaissance (1873). There Pater discusses aesthetic experience as individual and isolated: the impressions that sensory forces make on the mind (and, he implies, 

the body) constitute a unique, personal, and fl eeting experience, a “continual vanishing 

away” that functions as a constant “weaving and unweaving of ourselves.”4

Aside from the painting La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, it is the peacocks, of 

course, that dominate Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. Whistler wrote to 

Leyland’s wife, Frances, in August 1876, “I am nearly blind with sleep and blue peacocks 

feathers.”5 Not only does a frenzy of feathers eddy and fl ow across the surfaces, but directly opposite the entrance to the room are three glorious, real-gold-covered shutters 

snaked with peacocks, their features picked out with blue green. The central shutter has 

two birds, their magnifi cent tails descending its entire length. These two birds are fl anked 

by two slightly shorter shutters, both of which depict single birds, their tails unfurled 

(Figure 5). Beneath the shorter shutters are blue-green panels decorated with a meandering band of abstracted golden feathers. Emblazoned across the Prussian blue of the 

south wall, facing La Princesse, are the two glowing and glowering birds of L’Art et L’Argent, 

with their glinting glass eyes. The bird on the left, depicting Whistler, has the artist’s distinct silver streak in its plumage. The bird on the right, representing Leyland, is feathered 

with both gold and silver coins spilling to the ground. There are around thirty coins—the 

price of Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ. From this we might infer that for a few worthless coins, the artist’s talents have been betrayed. Nevertheless, these fi ghting birds are 

exquisitely beautiful, and the luminous peacocks and feathers created by Whistler’s paintbrush transform the room from a domestic space into something seemingly magical. 

Peacock feathers became popular among Aesthetes in the nineteenth century 

because of their orientalist links, their exquisite beauty, and their hint of unconventionality, particularly in a British domestic interior where, folklore has it, peacock feathers 

are unlucky. In addition, the artist’s depiction of the peacock in the Leyland dining room 

FIGURE 5. Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. View of the east wall and shutters. Freer Gallery of Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.

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The Artist as Magus 71

owes a huge debt to Japanese art, particularly the work of Utagawa Hiroshige. Japonisme 

was, however, probably not the only root of the peacock’s popularity in Aesthetic circles. 

The fashionable coupling of blue-and-white china with the feathers of the peacock may 

have originated with Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1860s. As his brother William Michael 

Rossetti recounts, Dante Gabriel kept a peacock on the grounds of his Cheyne Walk 

residence, Tudor House:

Here, extracted from my Diary for December 1871, is a curious 

anecdote about the peacock, which may perhaps deserve a 

moment’s attention: “The deer that Gabriel used to have, now 

dead, one day saw the peacock making a great display of his 

train. ... The deer followed him about; and, though not displaying 

any peculiarly marked ill-will, systematically trampled out all his 

train feathers, one after the other. Shortly after this, Gabriel gave 

the peacock away.”6

Apparently, once its glamour was denuded, Rossetti rescued the tail feathers and 

placed them in a blue-and-white china vase. Whatever the origin of this Aesthetic fashion, though, peacock feathers and their colors caught on like wildfi re in the 1870s and 

1880s. This fascination extended to Frederic Leighton’s inclusion of an entire stuffed bird 

in the Arab Hall of Leighton House, the color of which was echoed in the William De 

Morgan tiles he commissioned for the walls (and which resurfaces in De Morgan’s work 

for the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company; see Deusner, Figure 8).7

Nevertheless, it is worth considering the peacock more deeply, as for centuries its 

feathers represented the rebirth and fecundity of spring; hence, in the 1868 version of 

Burne-Jones’s Green Summer (private collection), Jane Burden Morris holds one aloft. As 

an ancient symbol of eternal life, the peacock feather was appropriated by early practitioners of Christianity as an important symbol of the death and resurrection, both 

of Christ and true believers; thus, peacock feathers can still be seen on early Christian 

sarcophagi in the catacombs of Rome. This notion of the peacock as a representation of 

immortality must have greatly appealed to an artist who hoped to achieve immortality 

through his art and through the reception and acceptance of his work as that of a genius.8

The peacock has numerous mythical connotations as well. One is as a symbol of 

transformation, as witnessed by a story in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. In the Roman 

poet’s account, the numerous eyes of the peacock’s tail were those of the monstrous, 

many-eyed Argus (or “he who sees everything”), who was decapitated by Mercury while 

attempting to guard Io from a lustful Jove. The eyes were placed on the bird by the 

goddess Juno, who “spreads them in her peacock’s gaudy tail.”9

 Thus, the peacock also 

symbolizes the act of seeing and the world of the visual. 

The world described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses is one dominated by uncertainty and 

change rather than moral and social absolutes. Consequently, in the nineteenth century, 

Ovid’s poem was generally regarded as morally suspect, as it portrays a world fi xated on 

the here and now and offers no consequences for supposedly immoral behavior.10 Despite 

the controversial nature of Ovid’s work, many classically educated Victorians in artistic 

and intellectual circles would have recognized the peacock as a metamorphic creature, 

one particularly associated with the process of seeing. In the Ovidian story of the tail of 

the peacock, the trigger for the transformation is desire—in this particular case, that of 

Zeus for Io. In the tale of the Peacock Room, the trigger for the transformation is also 

desire—that of Whistler for beauty, for artistic independence, and for the fame and 

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72 Palaces of Art

recognition that would bring him the 

money to live and work comfortably. 

In this context, Whistler’s use of the 

butterfl y for his signature was not 

merely whimsical. The butterfl y is the 

most immediate and easily recognizable 

symbol of metamorphosis—the insect 

that transforms itself from a generally 

unattractive crawling grub into one of 

the most delicate and gorgeous creatures on earth. In the Peacock Room, 

Whistler pointedly places the butterfl ies close to the peacocks, not only 

to stamp his mark upon the room but 

perhaps also to suggest some connection between the two creatures. 

The notion of metamorphosis may 

also be linked to the transformative 

processes of the ancient art of alchemy, 

as Whistler’s writings and correspondence demonstrate. Forging a link 

between the products of alchemy and 

art has a long history in the Western 

world, and the allusions, allegories, 

metaphors, and mysteries inherent in 

alchemy remain an astonishingly rich 

source of material for artists. In the 

twentieth century, the artist Joseph 

Beuys took on the persona of alchemist as part of his self-mythologizing 

persona as shaman and magus, much as 

Whistler preached in the Ten O’Clock. 

Rebecca Horn and Sigmar Polke have 

also explored the relationship between 

alchemy and art in their practice. For 

instance, in his Hermes Trismegistos I–IV

series (Figure 6), Polke examines the 

direct analogies between the practice 

of alchemy as symbolized by its mythical Greco-Egyptian founder Hermes 

Trismegistus and the transformation 

of pigments, ideas, and infl uences into 

art via the conduit of artistic creativity. Whistler’s awareness of this connection relates—crucially—directly to his creation of the Peacock Room, where peacocks become 

linked to another very specifi c metamorphic process. In alchemical thought and writings, 

the transformation of base metal into gold is the most discussed (and ridiculed) of the 

goals, but equally important are the many stages of material transformation symbolized 

FIGURE 6. Sigmar Polke, Hermes Trismegistos I–IV, 1995. 

Synthetic resin and lacquer on polyester fabric, four parts: 

I, 200 × 190 cm; II–IV, 300 × 400 cm. Collection of De Pont 

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands.

FIGURE 7. Attributed to Salomon Trimosin, Peacock in Flask, 

in Splendor Solis, ca. 1582. © British Library Board 

(Harley 3469 f27).

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The Artist as Magus 73

by all manner of colors and creatures.11 In the vast corpus of alchemical writings, one of 

the most crucial of these stages is the Cauda Pavonis, “the peacock’s tail” (Figure 7). This 

stage reveals that the seeker or alchemist is on the right path, indicated by a sudden rush, 

a fl ood, of all the colors ever known and more besides. The rapid cycling of gorgeous 

iridescence could fool the uninitiated into thinking that the goal had been accomplished, 

but this apparent completion is an illusion, for this stage is merely the midway point in 

the process of transmutation. It is not only the color of the peacock when it fans its tail 

and realizes the full glory of its beauty that symbolizes this transformation: in medieval 

belief, it was popularly thought that the peacock was capable of healing itself by eating 

its own feces—the literal changing of putrefi ed matter into goodness. In selecting the 

colors and the image of the peacock as his central decorative motif, Whistler offers a 

sparkling self-referential form of iconology. Not only does he allude to the act of artistic 

creation itself as the material and mental alteration of base materials and ideas into the 

gold of art, but it seems likely that he had some knowledge of the symbolic meanings of 

peacocks outlined above and that transformation of the surfaces of the room into a mass 

of translucent feathers could be an allusion to at least some of these ideas. The Peacock 

Room thus transmutes from Jeckyll’s Tudoresque interior into an elusive and capricious 

set of surfaces. 

This transformation and the intellectual jump to concepts of alchemy in relation to 

the Peacock Room—and, more generally, Whistler’s practice as an artist—are articulated in the most celebrated of the texts that he published. In his Ten O’Clock lecture, 

Whistler explicitly describes his concept of art and artistic practice in terms of the 

ancient notion of the artist as alchemical magus:

Nature contains the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, 

as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. 

But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with 

science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful. ... 

Thus is Nature ever his resource and always at his service, and 

to him is naught refused. 

Through his brain, as through the last alembic, is distilled the 

refi ned essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and 

which they left him to carry out.12

The artist’s mind is the fi nal “alembic” in the metamorphic alchemical process; it is 

the very site of creative refi ning, a notion that was already current in Aesthetic circles 

because of Pater’s employment of similar imagery, and it seems likely that Whistler had 

read Pater’s work. Indeed, Whistler’s instruction and assertion in the Ten O’Clock lecture, 

“Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation,” is 

remarkably similar to Pater’s contention in The Renaissance that to the critic with a true 

aesthetic sense, “all periods, types, schools of taste, are in themselves equal.”13 Likewise, 

Whistler’s description of the task of the artist as one who refi nes all experience into art 

seems to draw heavily upon Pater’s text. In the preface to The Renaissance, Pater utilizes 

the imagery of material alchemy and the purifi cation of intellectual and artistic matter 

in relation to his discussion of Wordsworth’s early poetry, celebrating the poet’s “conviction of the existence of certain latent affi nities between nature and the human mind, 

which reciprocally gild the mind and nature with a kind of ‘heavenly alchemy.’”14

 Whistler sometimes alludes to alchemy in his correspondence. In a draft of an unWhistlerBook.indb 73 WhistlerBook.indb 73 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
74 Palaces of Art

published letter to Frederick Greenwood, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, of September 

1879 or 1880, Whistler uses alchemical terms to criticize an anonymous article that he 

assumes was written by the art critic Harry (’Arry) Quilter: “Also the ... matter itself is 

very like what it used to be—and quite untouched by the furnace after all—wherein it 

is more unyielding than the gold of the refi ner.”15 Indeed, the word “refi ned” in conjunction with Whistler’s art appears time and time again in his correspondence, including 

an August 1876 letter to Frances Leyland regarding the Peacock Room itself, in which 

he describes the room as “thoroughly new and most gorgeous though refi ned.”16 I am 

not claiming here that Whistler was a practicing alchemist (although it is clear from his 

ongoing attendance at séances that he was interested in the occult), nor am I positing 

that the Peacock Room is an allegory of alchemical practice. I am instead offering up 

the idea that Whistler understood the process of alchemy and therefore used two of 

its most important symbols—the peacock (transformation) and gold (completion)—to 

articulate the idea of the artist as the Creator, not just a creator: the artist as alchemist 

and master of the mutability of matter. 

Because of Whistler’s performative persona as the “genius artist” and his associated 

denials of outside infl uences upon his art, it is not clear where he fi rst learned of these 

correlations between art and alchemy. Undoubtedly, interest in alchemy was gaining 

momentum in Britain at exactly the time that Whistler was creating the Peacock Room. 

As Alex Owen has written in The Place of Enchantment, her study of occultism in Britain 

around the fi n de siècle, 

A few scattered publications on alchemy during the fi rst half of 

the nineteenth century became a steady if small stream after 

the 1870s. ... Mme. Blavatsky addressed the philosophy of 

alchemy in “Isis Unveiled” and “The Secret Doctrine,” and several 

infl uential Theosophists were interested in the subject. According 

to Isabelle de Steiger, Miss Atwood (the author of a “mystical” 

mid-century book on alchemy) bequeathed her father’s valuable 

alchemical library to the prominent theosophist A. P. Sinnett for 

use by the members of the Theosophist Society.17

It is, however, possible that Whistler encountered alchemy while living in Paris, then 

a center for the occult, or from Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry displays alchemical 

knowledge; it might have been through his connection, via Swinburne, to the occultist 

Edward Bulwer-Lytton.18 He also might have had knowledge of the Splendor Solis, one 

of the Harley manuscripts in the British Library, which were known to members of 

Whistler’s artistic circles, including Swinburne, Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Dante 

Gabriel Rossetti.19 Certainly, his specifi c use of the term “alembic” demonstrates at least 

a passing knowledge of the equipment used in alchemy. 

The idea of the artist as alchemist runs contrary to the Platonic concept of the artist 

as a base imitator of material reality. In the alchemical process, matter is transubstantiated 

in a manner normally associated only with the divine; alchemy, particularly when a homunculus is created, actively denies the inimitability of God the Father, or of the gods, as the 

originator(s) of the breath of life. Whistler joyfully makes explicit the sacrilegious nature 

of the idea of the artist as godlike creator when he states in the Ten O’Clock “that Nature 

is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally 

taken for granted. ... This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost 

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The Artist as Magus 75

blasphemous.” Just as the deity creates form from chaos, so does the alchemist-artist. As 

Whistler makes clear in his lecture, in shaping form out of the formlessness, the alchemist-artist purposely enters into a rivalry with God or the gods, and the gods themselves 

will be jealous of the artist. In a Christian culture such as Britain in the 1870s, the idea that 

the artist rivaled or even surpassed God was not “almost blasphemous”—it was explicitly 

blasphemous: “Set apart by them to complete their works, he produces that wondrous 

thing called the masterpiece, which surpasses in perfection all that they have contrived in 

what is called Nature; and the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more 

beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their own Eve.”20

In alchemy, gold is the spiritual “light” and also, of course, the material metal of 

human desires and needs. In the gaslit twilight of the Peacock Room, gold is spun across 

every surface, as if Rumpelstiltskin himself had gone wild one night with the spinning 

wheel. Whistler was well aware of the many connotations of gold, and his relationship 

to all of its meanings is complex. In his paintings, and in the frames he also created, he 

used a multiplicity of golds as artistic pigments of many shades and tones. Likewise, in the 

Peacock Room, the gold on the walls is what he called “the green gold”—Dutch metal, 

or imitation gold leaf, that he applied and allowed to oxidize, then coated with clear 

green varnish to create a subdued, antique effect (Figure 8).21 The real thing—the almost 

orange-toned, true gold leaf—is used on the shutters, so that its marvelous effect and 

that of the glorious peacocks thereon would only be unfurled at night, when the room 

was transformed into its true purpose—as a dining room.

22

Whistler did not see gold only as the symbolic artistic outcome of his creative process; its symbolism and value as actual reward for his achievements was of vital importance. Gold embodied society’s recognition of his skill as an artist. In 1863 he won a gold 

medal for his etchings and was clearly intensely proud of this achievement, for he mentions it in various letters from 1863 and even during the 1878 libel trial against Ruskin.23

Whistler knew that even if his paintings were often regarded with skepticism during the 

1860s and 1870s, his prints would always make money. Part of his wish to earn money 

from the Peacock Room was simply to be able to pay his debts and to afford to travel to 

Venice and create prints of the city, which he knew would sell. While he was still painting 

the room he wrote to his mother, “I have taken up etching again and have found that 

people still prefer Whistlers to all others—but the stock is not yet in absolute working 

order so that I must for a while longer stick hard at it—a printing press has been lent to 

me and soon I trust I shall turn some copper into gold!”24 It is possible that the allusions 

to alchemical transformation here are not accidental. The link between the copper plate 

FIGURE 8. Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, details showing decoration over Dutch metal. Freer 

Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.

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76 Palaces of Art

used in engraving (and etching) and alchemy is not tenuous; it may well indicate not just 

Whistler’s understanding of his craft but also a passing knowledge of some of its traditions and mythologies. As his illustrious artistic forebear William Blake knew, the graving 

tool had sacred and alchemical associations with Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical 

founder of both alchemy and engraving. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes, 

“I was in a Printing house in Hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted 

from generation to generation.”25 Given that Whistler was extremely close to the poet 

Algernon Charles Swinburne from their fi rst meeting in 1862 until the two men fell out 

in 1888, it seems highly likely that Whistler had read Swinburne’s book William Blake: A 

Critical Essay (1868), in which the poet explores The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in some 

depth and claims this prophetic work to be “the greatest of his books.”26 It follows that 

Whistler may well also have read this work by Blake. 

However, gold in its most basic form was, for Whistler, simply the cold hard cash that 

would enable him to live and to buy materials. It was Leyland’s insulting payment of one 

thousand pounds, rather than the two thousand golden guineas he had requested for his 

creation of the Peacock Room, that led to Whistler returning to add L’Art et L’Argent to 

the south wall. The painting explicitly refers to the patron’s materially and symbolically 

offensive payment for what Whistler saw to be such a momentous work. Whistler had 

eventually agreed to a payment of one thousand guineas, but Leyland paid him in pounds. 

Professionals (including artists) were paid in guineas and workmen in pounds, and in making 

such a gesture Leyland was slighting Whistler’s artistic abilities as well as diminishing his 

fi nances.27

Yet Whistler’s concerted efforts to publicize the room and himself were not undertaken simply because he wished to accumulate wealth or to achieve fame for fame’s 

sake; he seems to have hoped that recognition and acclaim for such a spectacular artistic 

endeavor would enable him to achieve his full potential as an artist, unfettered by the demands of patrons and debt collectors. Indeed, he made it quite clear that he despised the 

accumulation of gold for its own sake: “My picture of a ‘Harmony in Grey and Gold’ is 

an illustration of my meaning. ... All that I know is that my combination of grey and gold 

is the basis of the picture. Now this is precisely what my friends cannot grasp. They say, 

‘Why not call it “Trotty Veck,” and sell it for a round harmony of golden guineas?’”28 As 

much as Whistler needed gold, he would not compromise his artistic integrity to gain it.

Despite Whistler’s alchemical allusions, the Peacock Room is not simply an illustration of its transformative or magical processes. Rather, Whistler uses the symbols of 

metamorphosis and alchemy to create a work of art that expresses both the anxieties 

and the ecstasies inherent in the act of artistry. Thus, the canvas of this room not only 

displays his immense skill as an artist but also acts as a very public act of mythmaking. 

Whistler tirelessly publicized the room throughout the time he was working on it, 

treating Leyland’s dining room as his personal fi efdom, inviting a number of important 

artistic lions and celebrities of the day, including John Everett Millais, E. W. Godwin, Ellen 

Terry, Sir Henry and Alan Cole, and Princess Louise. He left dishes of invitation cards in 

fashionable and artistic establishments such as Liberty & Co. for his press preview of the 

room on February 9, 1877; he also published a brochure to hand out to all the attendees 

and invited journalists from numerous publications to view the room in late 1876 and 

early 1877.29

Whistler not only wished to use the room to establish his reputation as an important artist and to attempt to become the most sought-after designer of Aesthetic 

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The Artist as Magus 77

interiors at a time when such a trade was rather lucrative; he also wanted the fantastical stories surrounding the room to elevate it to legendary status, and the journalists 

obliged. Only the gossip columnist Talon Rouge of Vanity Fair thought the Peacock Room 

over the top, preferring Thomas Armstrong’s interior at 52 Prince’s Gate. Nevertheless, 

Talon Rouge fully acknowledged Whistler’s attempt to display the room as a mythic site. 

Alluding to the diet of John the Baptist in the wilderness, he wrote, “And the same John 

had his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was 

locusts and honey” (Matt. 3:4). Talon Rouge remarked that “one could not feed on ordinary meals in such a room. Perhaps locusts and wild honey might be allowed.”30 Whistler 

had created a space that would not only articulate his mystical concept of artistic genius 

as a process of transmutation but also wove a series of constantly metamorphosing 

myths around it so that each individual observer could fashion, tell, alter, and retell his or 

her own myths of the Peacock Room. Indeed, for a room that celebrates mutability, it is 

fi tting that the Peacock Room has itself undergone transformation after transformation 

in the years since its creation. 

The room thus functions as an articulation of Whistler’s vision of the artist as magus, 

a fi gure whose creative abilities rival, or perhaps surpass, those of the gods themselves. 

For Whistler, the goal was beauty and eternal fame. Ovid understood that his own soul 

would live on through the reception of his writings: 

The work is finish’d, which nor dreads the rage

Of tempests, fi re, or war, or wasting age;

Come, soon or late, death’s undetermin’d day,

This mortal being only can decay;

My nobler part, my fame, shall reach the skies,

And to late times with blooming honours rise: 

Whate’er the unbounded Roman power obeys

All climes and nations shall record my praise:

If ‘tis allow’d to poets to divine,

One half of round eternity is mine.31

Whistler sought that same immortality through the art of this Aesthetic interior.

Notes

 1. For more on the myths and stories that surround the room, see Linda Merrill’s authoritative history of the room, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (Washington, 

DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1998).

 2. For more on the Green Dining Room, see Sally-Anne Huxtable, “Re-reading the 

Green Dining Room,” in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and 

Crafts, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010), 25–40.

 3. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 17. 

 4. Walter Pater, “Poems by William Morris,” Westminster Review 34 (October 1868): 

310. 

 5. Whistler to Frances Leyland, August 20/31, 1876, GUW 08054.

 6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family-Letters, with a Memoir by 

William Michael Rossetti (London, 1895), 1:254.

 7. For a rather breathlessly admiring account of the interior of Leighton House, see 

WhistlerBook.indb 77 WhistlerBook.indb 77 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
78 Palaces of Art

Mary Eliza Haweis, “Sir Frederick Leighton’s House,” in Beautiful Homes (London, 

1882), 1–12.

 8. The adoption of religious iconography by practitioners of Aestheticism has been 

discussed by a number of scholars, including Colin Cruise and Joanna Meacock. See 

Colin Cruise, “Versions of the Annunciation: Wilde’s Aestheticism and the Message 

of Beauty,” in After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, ed. 

Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 167–87. See 

also Joanna Meacock, “Apostles of the New Gospel: Whistler and Rossetti,” in James 

McNeill Whistler in Context: Essays from the Whistler Centenary Symposium, University of 

Glasgow, 2003, ed. Lee Glazer, Margaret F. McDonald, Linda Merrill, and Nigel Thorp 

(Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 2008), 31–44.

 9. Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books, trans. John Dryden et al., ed. Samuel Garth 

(London, 1717), 1:859–60, 1001–5. 

 10. For more on the unease with which Ovid’s work was generally regarded in the 

nineteenth century, see Norman Vance, “Ovid and the Nineteenth Century,” in Ovid 

Renewed: Ovidian Infl uences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth 

Century, ed. Charles Martindale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 

215–41.

 11. The most famous of all of the works ridiculing alchemy is Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841; repr., London: Wordsworth 

Reference, 1995).

 12. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 14, 16.

 13. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 10; Walter Pater, preface to The Renaissance: Studies in Art and 

Poetry, 2nd ed. (London, 1888), xii.

 14. Walter Pater, “Coleridge’s Writings,” Westminster Review 29, no. 1 (January 1866): 

108.

 15. Whistler to Frederick Greenwood, September 18, 1879/80, GUW 04375. Whistler 

bore a particular grudge against ’Arry, who became the incumbent of the “White 

House” after Whistler lost it when he was made bankrupt in May 1879. 

 16. Whistler to Frances Leyland, August 20/31, 1876, GUW 08058.

 17. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 123.

 18. For an example of alchemy in the writings of Bulwer-Lytton, see Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Zanoni: A Rosicrucian Tale of Alchemy, Immortality, and the Wisdom of the Mystic 

Masters (Leipzig, 1842). For evidence of Baudelaire’s interest in alchemy, see the 

poem “Alchimie de la Douleur” (The Alchemy of Suffering) in Charles Baudelaire, 

Les Fleurs du mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston: David R. Godine, 1985), 78. In this 

poem of ca. 1861 (it does not appear in the 1857 version), Baudelaire references the 

intervention of Hermes Trismegistus in his misery and posits himself as a “reverse 

Midas,” who turns gold into iron. For a more general discussion of occult and alchemical practices in Paris in the nineteenth century, see Elizabeth K. Menon, “Guilt 

or Gold: Alchemy and Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Paris,” in Art and Alchemy, 

ed. Jacob Wamburg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2006), 149–70. In the second half of the nineteenth century, alchemy also 

experienced something of a surge of interest in America, where Whistler had many 

contacts even if he did not visit his homeland. In 1857 the professional soldier and 

occultist scholar Ethan Allen Hitchcock published a study of alchemy and alchemists, 

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The Artist as Magus 79

a work that is thought to have had a great deal of infl uence on Carl Jung’s later work: 

see E. A. Hitchcock, Remarks upon Alchemy and Alchemists (Boston, 1857). Also, 

as various studies have demonstrated, the literature of Edgar Allen Poe, Edward 

Taylor, Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne all show the marked infl uence of 

alchemical ideas. For more on alchemy in American literature, see Randall A. Clack, 

The Marriage of Heaven and Earth: Alchemical Regeneration in the Works of Taylor, Poe, 

Hawthorne, and Fuller (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000). It is often conjectured that 

Hawthorne was a practicing alchemist, and it is pertinent to note that during the 

1870s Whistler was frequently socializing with Hawthorne’s son, the writer Julian 

Hawthorne. See the letter from Julian Hawthorne to Whistler, January 11, 1889, 

GUW 02055.

 19. For a discussion of the infl uence of medieval manuscripts on the Morris-Rossetti 

circle, see Julian Treuherz, “The Pre-Raphaelites and Mediaeval Illuminated Manuscripts,” Pre-Raphaelite Papers, ed. Leslie Parris (London: Tate Gallery Publications, 

1984), 167. See also Michaela Braesel, “The Infl uence of Medieval Manuscripts on the 

Pre-Raphaelites and the Early Poetry of William Morris,” Journal of William Morris 

Studies 15, no. 4 (Summer 2004): 41–54.

 20. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 14, 16.

 21. Whistler to Frederick Leyland, ca. August 9, 1876, GUW 08791. 

22. David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, 

DC: Freer Gallery of Art in association with W. W. Norton, 1984), 56–57; Merrill, 

Peacock Room, 210–21.

 23. See, for example, Whistler to Henri Fantin-Latour, July 6/10, 1863, GUW 08043: “I 

have been awarded the gold medal in Holland! Slip this to the Commandant at the 

Café de Bade, so that the others can hear, and so that it will naturally be known everywhere. Have it put in the Figaro, and by Burty in the Presse and Baudelaire could 

well do me an article about it.”

 24. Whistler to Anna Matilda Whistler, September 26/27, 1876, GUW 06564.

 25. William Blake, “A Memorable Fancy (3),” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (London, 

ca. 1793), n.p. One of Blake’s biographers, Peter Ackroyd, notes that Blake believed 

“the art of engraving was known to the Hebrews and their Chaldean ancestors—and 

that it went further back to Zoroaster, to Mercurius Trismegistus and even to God 

himself, who engraved the tables of stone for Moses”: Blake (London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1995), 39.

 26. Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Blake: A Critical Study (London, 1868), 204.

 27. Most of the correspondence containing the argument between Whistler and Leyland 

is in The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler (GUW); the crucial letters were 

sent between October 1876 and August 1877. 

 28. Whistler, “The Red Rag,” in The Gentle Art, 126.

 29. Two copies of this pamphlet are held in the archives of Glasgow University Library. 

One was owned by Charles Augustus Howell: see Whistler to Howell, February 9, 

1877, GUW 02847, including the printed pamphlet “Harmony in Blue and Gold. The 

Peacock Room.” The other is a version with annotations by E. W. Godwin, February 

16, 1877, GUW 01734.

 30. Talon Rouge, “The Social Week,” Vanity Fair, March 3, 1877, 138.

 31. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 15:1234–43

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Interior Motives: Whistler’s Studio 

and Symbolist Mythmaking

John Siewert

The theme of the artist’s studio frequently serves as a metaphor for a 

creative self, a means of placing the 

artist physically and fi guratively.1

 Here I am 

concerned with the idea of “place” in that 

doubled sense of the word: in a literal sense, 

I am interested in questions about the artist’s 

studio as place and actual space, while at the 

same time I also want to suggest some implications that this particular place might have 

for an art historical effort to place Whistler 

within Aestheticism and a larger modernist 

narrative. Such a project appeared already 

within the artist’s own lifetime, as critical 

essays and monographs, especially prevalent 

in fi n-de-siècle French criticism, sought to 

produce a persona seen in the context of 

Whistler’s studio contents and his paintings of 

places and people. In appraisals that repeatedly invoke strikingly similar patterns and 

images, critics described Whistler’s studio as 

a secluded site where the artist effectively 

retreated from the public into a world of his 

own creation. 

A number of archival photographs 

document Whistler’s studio and his presence 

there, particularly his Paris atelier on the rue Notre Dame des Champs in the sixth 

arrondissement (Figure 1), where he worked for several periods in the 1890s, a space 

that provides a point of departure for Anna Gruetzner Robins’ essay in this volume. 

But Whistler himself left us with very few pictures of his studios. One early image, a 

pencil and pen-and-ink drawing of 1856 in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, 

depicts a contemplative, disheveled fi gure, no doubt meant to be taken as Whistler, 

who sits among the clutter of bohemian life in a Latin Quarter garret (Figure 2).2

 A 

decade later, in a painting from around 1865 (Figure 3), we fi nd a more unmistakable 

Whistler, elegant and confi dent at his easel and accompanied by female models in a 

FIGURE 1. Whistler in his Paris studio, 86 rue Notre Dame des 

Champs, 1890s. Photograph by M. Dornac. Charles Lang Freer 

Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Archive, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

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82 Palaces of Art

fashionable London space appointed 

with the signs of success and the 

elevated taste that were being shaped 

into that something called Aestheticism: a collection of blue-and-white 

china; a Japanese fan held by one of 

the women and what appear to be 

Japanese scroll paintings hanging on the 

back wall; and a framed print, probably 

one of Whistler’s own etchings, at the 

far right. With its prominent mirror, 

the composition clearly looks to the 

infl uence of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, 

a picture that makes its own claims 

about the studio and the relationship 

of the artist to a wider public.3

 Whistler’s painting was intended as a study 

for a larger, never realized picture that 

was to have included his colleagues 

Henri Fantin-Latour and Albert Moore, 

a summation of sorts of Whistler’s 

creative self-conception at the time. As 

such, this painting is a sketch—a fragment of a bigger project.

Another sort of fragment, a photograph by the French art critic and poet Julien Leclerq, also derives from the situation of Whistler in his studio, although in a less obvious 

way (Figure 4). An artifact of a visit to Whistler’s studio in Paris at an undetermined moment during the later 1890s, the photograph appears in an idiosyncratic book, probably 

published sometime around 1900 (it bears no publication date) and titled Le Caractère 

et la main (Character and the Hand). In it, Leclercq photographically documented and 

analyzed the hands of thirty well-known personalities of the day, celebrities such as the 

statesman and writer Georges Clemenceau, author Émile Zola, and artists including the 

sculptors Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou—and it also includes the painter James McNeill 

Whistler.

Julien Leclercq was an early champion of Vincent van Gogh; he was a close friend of 

Paul Gauguin (he has been referred to as “Gauguin’s shadow”); he frequently contributed to the infl uential journal the Mercure de France; he was a poet on the edge of the 

Stéphane Mallarmé circle that included Whistler himself—and so he brings us fully into 

the generation of Symbolist writers whose words about Whistler repeatedly seek to 

construct a literary equivalent for the reserve and refi nement they admired in his art.4 In 

1889, for instance, the French novelist and critic Joris-Karl Huysmans published his volume titled Certains, a collection of critical essays about contemporary artists that looks 

at Whistler’s landscapes and portraits and concludes with this:

And that will be his glory, as it will be that of others who shall 

have scorned public taste—to have aristocratically practiced an 

art resistant to common ideas, which effaced itself before the 

crowds, a resolutely solitary, haughtily secret art.5

FIGURE 2. James McNeill Whistler, An Artist in His Studio, Seated before 

a Table, ca. 1856. Pen and ink and pencil on paper, 23.4 cm (overall). Freer 

Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, F1906.104.

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Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking 83

FIGURE 3. James McNeill Whistler, The Artist in His Studio, 1865–66. Oil on paper mounted on panel, 62.9 × 46.4 cm. The 

Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of the American Art Collection, 1912.141. Photography © The Art Institute of Chicago.

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84 Palaces of Art

Huysmans’s statement about Whistler 

here is consistent with the profi les of the 

other artists he writes about in Certains, 

such as Edgar Degas, all of whom he characterized in terms of “retreat, interiority, 

and interiorized sensation,” as Degas 

scholar Carol Armstrong has observed.

As Armstrong notes, Huysmans saw in 

the imagery of Degas’s 1886 exhibition of 

bathers turned away from the viewer a 

repudiation of the public that amounted 

to an “insulting adieu.”6 And Huysmans 

identifi ed the privacy and disdain he 

wanted to see in Whistler’s art with that

artist’s own refusal to show his work in 

France since 1867 (although, to make this 

point, he takes considerable liberty with 

the facts).7

 Huysmans then takes up his 

tale again in 1882, when, he says, Whistler’s dark, mysterious canvases began 

to materialize once more in Paris exhibitions at venues including the Petit gallery, 

where he showed at least one Nocturne 

painting in 1883. Nor was Huysmans 

alone in emphasizing an essentially private, sequestered Whistler in writing about him during the roughly ten years on either 

side of 1900. Jacques-Émile Blanche, the French painter and essayist, wryly noted a 

widespread tendency to represent Whistler with a vaguely sinister infl ection, as “a sort 

of Mallarmé of painting, a visionary classifi ed between Poe and Maeterlinck, a black 

sorcerer shut up in his ebony tower, in the midst of a garden of dark poppies, in which 

the sun never warms the icy atmosphere.”8

 Despite Blanche’s exaggerated tone (and 

his words seem to be as much in admiration of an imagery as they are a condemnation 

of it), he gives us the essential ingredients for a Symbolist picture of Whistler: the comparison to poets of mystery; the allusions to decadence and black magic; a secluded 

tower of ebony, not ivory; and various other richly textured references to darkness 

and secrecy. In short, this passage is virtually a primer of tendencies followed in a 

number of other end-of-century texts, all of which share Whistler’s studio for their 

setting, whether that space was in Paris or London. In each case, the author claims 

that the experience of seeing the artist and his work in his own milieu brings about a 

new understanding of the relationship between Whistler and his art that the writer 

presents to his readers.

Even a brief sampling of the many Symbolist era descriptions of Whistler’s studio 

affi rms the kind of rhetoric we have already heard from Huysmans and Blanche. French 

art historian Gustave Geffroy, for one, wrote the following in the early 1890s about his 

visit to Chelsea:

The noise of the crowd expires on the threshold, the 

fashionable manifestations of sympathy are silenced. In this 

FIGURE 4. Whistler’s hand, from Julien Leclercq, Le Caractère et la main, n.d., p. 174.

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Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking 85

suburb of London, in this secluded abode, Whistler becomes 

the self-cloistered hermit, the master of a kingdom remote, 

silent, and strange, peopled by his thoughts and where he reigns 

surrounded by the mysterious landscapes he has traversed, and 

which he recreates, and by singular creatures dear to his heart 

and mind, his familiar friends.9

The studio milieu as a key to understanding the art that emanates from it is the device 

employed as well in observations from the German art historian Richard Muther, published in 1896. To know Whistler as an artist, Muther contends, “he must be visited in 

his home,” and he continues,

Whistler seems like a hermit in his secluded house, like 

the monarch of a far kingdom, peopled only with his own 

thoughts—a realm where he reigns in the midst of mysterious 

landscapes and grave and quiet men and women, who have 

stood near him in mind and spirit, and to whom his brush has 

given new life. ... The air which envelops them is at once bright 

and dark; the atmosphere of this silent room, in which the 

painter sees his models, has a subdued and shrouded daylight, an 

old light as it were, which has become harmonious like a faded 

Gobelin.10

Whistlerian discourse frequently appears to feed off itself, and in this case, Muther may 

be responding to Geffroy’s writing as much as to his own personal experience. In both 

accounts of studio visits, the encounter provides a context for a deeper appreciation of 

Whistler’s own empathy for the world from which he seems to have withdrawn.

Muther’s evocation of Whistler’s studio world adds atmospheric touches to 

Geffroy’s description, such as the German writer’s comparison of the dusty and dusky 

effect of the studio space to a faded tapestry. A somewhat deeper psychological 

portrait is sketched in the fi nal such narrative I want to consider, that of Octave Maus, 

critic and secretary of the Belgian avant-garde group Les XX, who was instrumental 

in soliciting Whistler’s participation in that society’s exhibitions.11 Maus follows the 

familiar form of a revelation in the artist’s home, now described as a “well-lighted 

studio in Chelsea,” which opened up to him as never before Whistler’s “art of dreams, 

sensations, and mystery, illuminated by fugitive fl ashes—and at the same time the singular refi nement of his eye.” Maus then draws a correlation, much as Geffroy had done, 

between the painter and the portraits on the studio walls: 

There was, indeed, a sort of intellectual relationship between 

himself and the painted fi gures wrought by his hands, who, 

in their narrow frames of dull gold, hung about his room. ... 

Whistler infused into their features and attitudes something of 

his own superfi ne nature; his psychology shone through on his 

sitters, transfi guring and elevating them—though he gave full 

value to their individuality—by the extreme distinction that was 

his gift. The atmosphere he wrapped them in was that of his 

own mind.12

Like the representations of Whistler’s studio related by both Geffroy and Muther, Maus 

details a self-created environment populated by the images of the painter’s own production, a world that the artist both creates and inhabits. And Maus performs what may be 

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86 Palaces of Art

the ultimate act of contextualization: 

he suggests that each of Whistler’s 

portraits is in essence a self-portrait.

It is to the portraits themselves, then, the works of art 

to which these writers were so 

drawn, that we now need to turn. 

My purpose here is not simply to 

test the validity of the claims made 

about the portraits in these studio 

visit accounts against the portrait 

paintings themselves. Rather, I am 

more interested to discover in the 

visual properties of Whistler’s later 

portraiture an imagery of presentation and withholding that is similar 

to that of the “studio visit” conceit itself. The trope of the artist 

secluded in his studio that we fi nd 

in Huysmans, Geffroy, Muther, and 

Maus—and numerous others like 

them—is ultimately a characterization of renunciation and reclusiveness that is presented for the 

reader’s consumption. It is a rhetorical imagery of disengagement that 

must be engaged with in order for 

it to have its effect. “Reserve” and 

“reticence” are not qualities we 

might readily associate with Whistler, at least not with the combative, publicity-seeking side of him. 

But they are key to the dynamic I 

want to identify in his later portraiture and which Symbolist critics 

extended to their experience of 

his studio environment and developed in their written responses to it. As the literary 

historian James Adams has noted recently, “reserve functions only in a social context. 

One can be quiet in solitude, but reserve must be displayed; it characterizes a subject 

in relation to an audience.”13 It is “reserve” in this sense of the word, then, that informs 

the writings about Whistler considered here. And a similar reserve, a withdrawal that 

seeks an audience, further characterizes the portraits those same writers so often 

were responding to in evoking the artist’s studio.

There is, in effect, a doubled aspect to Whistler’s most distinctive portrait paintings across his career. Michael Fried suggests that such a binary structure can be found 

refl ected in the initial critical response to The White Girl when it was exhibited in 1863 

at the Salon des Refusés. Later retitled Symphony in White, No. 1 (Figure 5), the work atFIGURE 5. James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: 

The White Girl, 1862. Oil on canvas, 213 × 107.9 cm. National 

Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Harris Whittemore Collection, 

1943.6.2.

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Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking 87

tracted considerable critical attention with its monumental, nearly monochromatic fi gure 

that many writers characterized as entranced, self-absorbed, a sleepwalker, or, as Fried 

summarizes, “unaware of being beheld.” One author called the painting the portrait of 

a spirit or a medium, and Gustave Courbet named it an apparition. As Fried has discovered in contemporary responses, at least one critic further noted that the bearskin upon 

which Whistler’s model stands seems to thrust itself out at the viewer, thus countering 

the fi gure’s absorption or distraction.14

This productive tension between the forces of withdrawal and presentation can be 

traced further, and perhaps more clearly, in two types of full-length portraiture that 

Whistler fi rst produced in the 1870s and which continued to evolve in the decades 

following. The fi rst category depicts the male fi gure elegantly clothed in black and posed 

before a dark, monochromatic background to create a subdued variation of the whiteon-white theme in the Symphony in White, No. 1. In the early 1870s, Whistler painted 

such a portrait of his patron Frederick Richards Leyland (Figure 6), establishing a formula 

he followed throughout the next several decades. The following decade, for example, 

in 1884, he produced an Arrangement in Black (1884, Carnegie Museum of Art; YMSM 

315), a portrait of the renowned Spanish violinist and composer Pablo de Sarasate. And 

one of the artist’s most arresting paintings of the 1890s is his portrait of the aristocratic 

French dandy and eccentric, the Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, an Arrangement in Black and Gold (Figure 7). It was a type of picture that Whistler continued to paint 

until the end; his portrait of George Washington Vanderbilt (National Gallery of Art; 

YMSM 481), begun in 1897, was still in progress when Whistler died in 1903. In each of 

these paintings, the dark-clad fi gure and muted background nearly merge into a continuous substance. Display of personality, social station, and accoutrements conventionally 

associated with portraiture seem threatened by the dissolution of such legibility, and 

the physical body depicted appears to be at odds with its own disembodiment. But into 

this enveloping atmosphere, Whistler introduces lighter accents of fl esh and fragments 

of white shirtfronts as conspicuous highlights. If the fi gure appears to retreat into the 

surrounding shadowy ambience, these higher-keyed details seem to advance, producing 

an image that is at once understated and striking.

The second type of Whistler’s full-length portraiture offers other variations on 

these themes in a category that the artist appears to have reserved exclusively for female 

sitters or, more properly speaking, standers. In his Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink of 

1871–74 (Figure 8), Whistler represents Frances Leyland, Frederick’s wife. That same 

decade, he painted Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of Miss Rosa Corder (1876–78, 

The Frick Collection; YMSM 203), in which Gustave Geffroy noted a “disdainful profi le,” musing that the subject belonged to what he called an extended family of “slender, 

haughty creatures, vivacious but silent, with white hands and secret looks.”15 This female 

portrait type expresses such haughty secrecy, perhaps even an arrogance, through the 

distinctive pose Whistler developed. The fi gure begins to turn her back to the viewer at 

the same time that she offers her profi le. As he did with the dark, male portraits, Whistler continued to explore this posture, which recurs throughout his oeuvre. It can be 

found again in Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur Jacket of the mid-seventies (1876, 

Worcester Art Museum; YMSM 181), where what I am calling reserve is further reinforced by a progressive fading of the image toward the hem of the model’s garment. And 

the pose appears in Whistler’s work as late as 1900, when he was still painting Mother of 

Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian (1888 [?]–1900, National Gallery of Art; YMSM 378).16

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88 Palaces of Art

In each of these examples, from early to late, the characteristic composition fully reveals the model’s dress, providing Whistler an occasion to study the fi nery of fashion artistically displayed as if on a mannequin. At the same time, the glimpse of the fi gure’s face 

affords the viewer the potential, at least, of making contact with the human subject. The 

result is a composition that is once again slightly at odds with itself, an image that engages 

the viewer even as it seems to guard itself somewhat from that gaze. At their most fully 

developed, these two portrait types, male and female alike, embody what I would like 

to suggest is a fundamental dynamic in Whistler’s art, an art founded on an aesthetic of 

“arrangement” and “harmony” that strives to keep in play a dialogue of opposing tendencies as much as it seeks a resolution of those factors in synthesis. And it is this same kind 

of character that the Symbolist era critics referred to here reproduce in the accounts of 

FIGURE 7. James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black 

and Gold: Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, 

1891. Oil on canvas, 208.6 × 91.8 cm. Copyright © The 

Frick Collection.

FIGURE 6. James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black: 

Portrait of F. R. Leyland, 1870–73. Oil on canvas, 218.5 × 

119.4 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1905.100.

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Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking 89

their visits to Whistler’s studio: for the elements of reserve and reclusiveness they want 

to conjure from Whistler’s art to have their intended effect, they require, of course, a 

reader.

One last example of the female portrait type is especially telling in this context. 

The composition Whistler arrived at in his Arrangement in Black (Figure 9), the portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, inspired a signifi cant amount of critical response. In 

keeping with the character of the Whistlerian world evoked in his essay from Certains, 

Huysmans described the Lady Campbell portrait as the representation of an elusive 

fi gure in retreat.17 For the French novelist and critic Camille Mauclair, the painting 

seemed to sum up the whole of Whistler’s artistic achievement when he saw the 

picture in the artist’s studio. “The entire art of Whistler has retreated beyond the confi nes of life,” Mauclair wrote, “and, like the portrait of Lady Campbell, regards it from 

FIGURE 9. James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black: La 

Dame au brodequin jaune—Portrait of Lady Archibald Campbell, 1882–84. Oil on canvas, 218.4 × 110.5 cm. Philadelphia M useum of Art. Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach 

Fund, 1895.

FIGURE 8. James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in Flesh Colour 

and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland, 1871–74. Oil on canvas, 195.9 × 102.2 cm. Copyright © The Frick Collection.

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90 Palaces of Art

over the shoulder, drawing on its glove somewhat disdainfully before vanishing into the 

darkness.”18

Given such repeated emphasis in the criticism on an artist willfully withdrawn to 

his studio to recreate that reclusive experience in paint, it is hardly surprising that 

Julien Leclercq would have sought a fi rmer grip on the subject when he produced his 

quasi-scientifi c reading of Whistler’s palm resulting from a visit to the artist’s studio in 

Paris. Leclercq describes waiting apprehensively on the threshold as he hears the muffl ed sounds of furniture and picture frames being moved and dragged around the room 

in response to his knock on the door. He hesitates for a moment before he knocks 

again, and the door opens slightly to reveal the skeptical face of the artist he has come 

to see. The Frenchman enters and sets up his camera equipment, then photographs 

the palm and the back of his subject’s right hand, Whistler’s painting hand (see Figure 

4).19 Leclercq’s careful examination of the hand, and his photographic documentation of 

it, provide a basis for interpretation, and in his book he proceeds to scrutinize the evidence before him, taking detailed inventory. A fi rm palm, he notes, even a bit dry, and 

nimble fi ngers with long, slender nails that indicate a great and subtle wit. A long little 

fi nger, average thumb, a short index fi nger. This is the hand of a fi ne, distinguished man, 

Leclercq deduces, a man whose sharp tongue skewers his victims with sarcasm.

But then Leclercq admits that such information ultimately has its limitations, 

and he ends the entire account of his brief studio encounter with these words: “I’m 

not dwelling on the brilliant and strong qualities of Whistler the artist, because what 

makes an artist great or mediocre is due to an intangible element of his makeup, and 

the man’s hand, of a substance less subtle and mysterious than his mind, isn’t subject 

to these nuances.”20 For Leclercq, the artist’s hand as the bodily origin of the creative 

act must have seemed to promise a tantalizing index to the very character of creativity. But objective study and observation fi nally are able to provide him only with 

information that confi rms the superfi cial impression of a well-known wit and not the 

more fundamental access to the artist he may have hoped to explain. Leclercq fi nally 

acknowledges that any connection between physical demeanor and artistic creation 

remains elusive and wrapped in mystery, and so we are returned, in a sense, to that 

more indefi nite environment invoked again and again by Leclercq’s Symbolist colleagues 

in their own critical accounts of a moment in Whistler’s studio.

Other writers within Leclercq’s Symbolist circle chose to emphasize the very 

nature of that elusiveness they identifi ed, claiming it as the essential character of both 

Whistler and his art, to the extent that it seemed to pervade the space within which 

he worked to produce that art—his studio. They labored to put that which was so 

hard to pin down about Whistler and his work into words: words such as “secluded,” 

“solitary,” “secret,” “reclusive,” and “reserved.” Earlier, I quoted James Adams commenting on that last quality, and his characterization of reserve underscores those 

qualities in Whistler’s work and self-presentation I have been examining here: “Reserve 

functions only in a social context. One can be quiet in solitude, but reserve must be 

displayed; it characterizes a subject in relation to an audience.” Signifi cantly, Adams is 

writing specifi cally about Walter Pater.21 In the aestheticist ambiance of his mid-sixties 

studio (see Figure 3), the painter’s pose—which I mean literally as well as fi guratively—

is not so very different from the ones struck by the artist’s models in the 1880s and 

1890s (see Figure 9). So I want to suggest that the presentational strategies focused 

on here in a Symbolist context surely have important implications for how we might 

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Whistler’s Studio and Symbolist Mythmaking 91

think about comparable aspects of Aestheticism, as we continue to seek ways to place 

Whistler in relation to the studio and beyond. 

Notes

 1. In the growing literature on the artist in his studio, see especially Svetlana Alpers, 

The Vexations of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), particularly 

chapter 1, “The View from the Studio,” 9–45. My thinking about representations of 

interior spaces is further indebted to Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

 2. Reproduced and discussed in Margaret MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler: Drawings, 

Pastels and Watercolours: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 

1995), 64.

 3. For a venerable interpretation of Velázquez’s picture in a social context, see Jonathan Brown, “On the Meaning of Las Meninas,” in Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 87–110.

 4. Leclercq was characterized as “the shadow of Gauguin” in a 1975 publication by 

Bengt Danielsson; see Richard Brettell, Françoise Cachin, Clare Freches-Thory, and 

Charles F. Stuckey, The Art of Paul Gauguin (Washington, DC: National Gallery of 

Art, 1988).

 5. J.-K. Huysmans, Certains (Paris, 1889), 73. Unless otherwise indicated, translations 

from the French are my own.

 6. Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 174.

 7. Contrary to what Huysmans states, Whistler exhibited in Paris between 1867 and 

1882, perhaps most notably in his one-man exhibition of 1873 at the Galerie Durand-Ruel, an event that appears not to have been widely noticed. The 1882 Exposition Universelle displays included a mahogany cabinet designed by E. W. Godwin, 

which Whistler decorated with painted Japanese cloud motifs and butterfl ies. 

Although Huysmans may not have been aware of them, he might have used these 

occasional offerings to reinforce his picture of Whistler’s extreme exclusivity.

 8. Jacques-Émile Blanche, Essais et portraits (Paris: Dorbon-Ainé, 1912), 6.

 9. Gustave Geffroy, La vie artistique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1892), 78–80.

 10. Richard Muther, The History of Modern Painting, vol. 3 (London, 1896), 651–52.

 11. Whistler sent seven works to Les XX in 1884 and eight canvases in 1888. On his 

association with the group, see Bruce Laughton, “The British and American Contributions to Les XX, 1884–93,” Apollo 86 (November 1967): 372–79.

 12. Octave Maus, “Whistler in Belgium,” International Studio 23 (July 1904): 11.

 13. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY: 

Cornell University Press, 1995), 189.

 14. See Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism; or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1996), 222–24.

 15. Geffroy, La vie artistique, 1:274–75.

 16. For additional examples of this female “back-view” portrait type, see Arrangement 

in Black, No. 2: Portrait of Mrs. Louis Huth (1872–73, private collection; YMSM 125); 

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92 Palaces of Art

Harmony in White and Blue (1870s, Leeds Art Gallery; YMSM 126); Harmony in Pink 

and Red (ca. 1876–78, believed destroyed and known only from a contemporary photograph; YMSM 192); Harmony in Black: Portrait of Miss Ethel Philip (1894, Hunterian 

Art Gallery; YMSM 419); and Rose et or: La Tulipe (1894–96; Hunterian Art Gallery; 

YMSM 418). For additional discussion of this Whistlerian portrait type, see Branka 

Nakanishi, “A Symphony Reexamined: An Unpublished Study for Whistler’s Portrait 

of Mrs. Frances Leyland,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 18 (1992): 156–57.

 17. Huysmans, Certains, 70.

 18. Camille Mauclair, De Watteau à Whistler (Paris: Fasquelle, 1905), 330.

 19. The photograph of the reverse side of Whistler’s hand appears in Julien Leclercq, Le 

Caractère et la main (Paris: F. Juven, n.d.), 177. Of the thirty famous subjects Leclercq 

catalogues in his book, Whistler is the only one to be given this front-and-back 

treatment.

 20. Leclercq, Le Caractère et la main, 176.

 21. Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints, 189. The characterization is made in chapter 5, 

“Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Masks and Masculinity in Pater’s Aestheticism.”

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Whistler’s Paris Studio: 

Place and Meaning

Anna Gruetzner Robins

This paper begins with a newly discovered interview conducted by the journalist Robert Harborough Sherard (Figure 1) in Whistler’s Paris 

studio in spring 1893.1 The interview reveals fresh 

information about the decorative scheme for the 

studio, casts new light on Whistler’s view of the Paris 

avant-garde, and raises questions about why he chose 

a studio so close to the Luxembourg Museum, where 

his iconic painting Arrangement in Grey and Black: 

Portrait of the Painter’s Mother was on display. Although 

the interview suggests that Whistler and Sherard had 

not met before, this was a bit of journalistic license. 

Oscar Wilde had introduced them in 1883, and Sherard continued to see Whistler in London, Paris, and 

Dieppe for the next twenty years.2 The interview is 

unsigned, but it is pasted into a press-cuttings book 

of Sherard’s journalism now in the collection of the 

University of Reading.3 Sherard came to the door 

unannounced and caught Whistler off guard, so the 

interview is less like one of Whistler’s usual performances, and Whistler spoke more freely than he 

ordinarily did when speaking to journalists. The two 

men covered a range of topics, and some unexpected 

names came up, including those of Paul Gauguin, 

Edouard Manet, and Joséphine Sâr Peladan.4

The studio was situated on the top fl oor of a 

six-fl oor purpose-built modern building at 86 Notre 

Dame des Champs in Montparnasse.5 A photograph 

of it (Figure 2), one of several taken in the 1890s, 

shows Whistler, surrounded by studio paraphernalia, 

reclining on a chaise longue with a fi xed ladder in one 

corner, leading up to a galleried area above. Sherard’s 

vivid description brings this faded sepia image of the 

cavernous space with its nooks and crannies to life:

FIGURE 1. Robert Harborough Sherard (1861–1943), n.d. 

Papers of Robert Harborough Sherard. Special Collections, University of Reading, Reading, England.

FIGURE 2. Whistler’s Studio, 86 rue Notre-Dame-desChamps, Paris, ca. 1892–1901. By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections, PH1/180.

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94 Palaces of Art

The studio is certainly one of the fi nest that I have seen in Paris. 

... Immense, lofty, with angles and doors and passages, with no 

vestige of ... symmetry. ... The walls are coloured in fl eshcolour, the woodwork of the doors is in dazzling white, and 

the curtains and draperies are ... green. ... To the right of the 

fi replace rises a lofty white ladder, which leads to a gallery ... all 

white, the balustrade of which curves. ... Behind the ladder is 

heaped up an immense provision of logs. The ... gallery leads to 

a mysterious little white door. ... And then, half-way along the 

gallery may be dimly seen another fl ight of steps, also in white 

wood, which turn round and lose themselves in darkness.

Whistler must have realized that he had an appreciative audience: he was initially 

suspicious because Sherard was a journalist, but he was soon keen to show him the 

“terraces and hothouses, and things,” and took him out onto “a broad terrace, with 

trellis-work and venetian-blinds ... which ran round the whole front, and turned off at 

angles,” with a heated “hothouse ... ‘where we shall grow fl owers, and grapes ... and 

charming things,’” and where he planned to hold “déjeuners” cooked in a kitchen with an 

“old French range, tiled, and so on.” Whistler had taken his usual care when furnishing 

what proved to be his largest studio:

The furniture is varied and beautiful. Here an Empire chevalglass with gilt appliqués and metal work. There against the wall, 

on the other side of the fi replace, three white wood boxes 

or cabinets of decreasing size heaped one on the other; here 

couches, and screens, and hanging draperies; and all about the 

room a plentiful supply of chairs in white wood with green 

decorations, as yet un-upholstered, but which, presently shall 

have tapestries upon them which shall recall, as Mr. Whistler told 

me, the fl esh-colour of the walls and the green of the draperies.

There is a heady mixture of the visual and the sensual on offer in this perfumed 

environment of beautiful things. Sherard’s closely observed descriptions of the effect of 

the colors, textures, and the scent of the fl owers and ripening grapes from the pocket of 

nature that the hothouse provided recall Basil Hallward’s studio in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of 

Dorian Gray, a book that Sherard, a longstanding friend of Wilde, would have known well.6

Whistler’s studio was a beautiful and aesthetic space, but the information we have 

about it is locked in time. The photographs, the descriptions, and the fabric of the building, which still stands in Montparnasse, allow us partially to reconstruct the day-to-day 

to and fro of the huge international mix of artists, writers, critics, and dealers who gathered there. For example, the young William Rothenstein, who also met Sherard through 

Wilde, was encouraged to take up lithography by Whistler, and he turned making lithographic portraits of the various cultural networks he encountered into a lifelong project.7

As interesting as a list of all the artists, critics, dealers, and collectors who made it up the 

steep stairs to the studio might be, my paper has a different purpose. I want to map out 

the meaning of that space and place for Whistler by looking at his representation of the 

nearby Luxembourg Gardens, where he would often walk on his way to see Arrangement 

in Grey and Black (the Mother, Figure 3) in the Luxembourg Museum. I want to suggest 

that Whistler chose a studio near the Luxembourg Gardens because it brought him close 

to the portrait of his mother, which, by all accounts, had a totemic signifi cance for him. 

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Whistler’s Paris Studio 95

The Paris studio was elaborate and large, but Whistler made very few paintings 

there. “No easel” was visible, “not one palette, none of the charming litter of the art,” 

observed Sherard, who noticed that a number of framed pictures had “their faces turned 

away.” Others also noted that the studio was an underused workspace. “Are those 

brushes wet or dry?” asked D. S. MacColl in 1893, when Whistler answered the “dazzling white door” holding a bunch in his hand. They were dry, of course. Indeed, his time 

was largely devoted to printmaking, also the topic of Margaret MacDonald’s essay in this 

volume. “Underneath the gallery, and screened off” was a printing press for etchings, 

“behind it a table with a [sic] litter and paraphernalia of the craft, and the only commercial-looking thing in all the place” was “a wooden thing with a screw” for keeping etchings fl at.8

 He did print a few etchings before 1894, when he stopped making etchings until 

1902; the lithographs Whistler made in Paris were sent back to London for printing.

 The studio was close to Whistler’s residence at 110 rue du Bac. He told Sherard 

that he had found it after “house-hunting for over a year,” and it had been the same with 

the studio. “I only found it after a long hunt, and I am really pleased with it.” A large, 

carefully arranged studio was a fi tting tribute to his growing reputation in the international art world, marked by the acquisition of the Mother by the Luxembourg Museum at 

the end of 1891, after an enthusiastic campaign led by Gustave Geffroy, Théodore Duret, 

Stéphane Mallarmé, and other leading critics and cultural fi gures in the Paris art world. 

Whistler was keen to tell Sherard that his picture hung in the museum opposite John 

FIGURE 3. James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, 1870–71. Oil on 

canvas, 144.3 × 163 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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96 Palaces of Art

Singer Sargent’s La Carmencita and in the same room as Edouard 

Manet’s Olympia.

9

 What would Whistler’s mother have thought 

of keeping company with a Spanish dancer and a prostitute with 

big ambition? Are you pleased with the way your picture is hung 

in the Luxembourg? Sherard asked. “Yes,” Whistler replied, 

“The Sargent is a fi ne picture, and the Manet—well, there are 

perhaps Manets that I like better, but altogether it is in a good 

place. Where else should it be?”

Between 1872 and 1891, Whistler had exhibited the picture 

eleven times, watched it slip out of his hands during his years of 

fi nancial insecurity, refused to sell it, and hung onto his hope of 

getting it back, which he fi nally did in 1888.10 Letting the picture 

go to the French state, twenty years after he painted it, was 

a momentous decision, and by taking a studio so close to the 

museum—a brisk fi ve-minute walk away—he ensured that he 

would be nearby and that the picture would continue to have 

an enduring presence in his life. As he wrote to his brother, William, in London: 

Amazing! Just think—To go and look at 

one’s own picture hanging on the walls 

of the Luxembourg!—remembering how 

it was treated in England—to be met 

everywhere with deference and treated 

with respect and vast consideration—to 

be covered with distinction (by the way 

I have just been promoted in the St. 

Michael—with a new jewel sent!)—and 

to know that all this is gall & bitterness 

and a tremendous slap in the face to the 

Academy and the rest! Really it is like a 

dream!—a sort of fairy tale.11

FIGURE 4. Stele with pediment showing a 

seated woman and attendant, fi rst century 

CE. Limestone, 152 cm. British Museum, 

London, registration number 1856,0710.21. 

© Trustees of the British Museum.

On his frequent visits to the museum, Whistler was no longer the artist-producer 

but an observing subject. Did Whistler admire this now untouchable painted object as an 

arrangement in line and color, or did it become an increasingly fetishized, residual image 

of time past that triggered memories of his mother? In an illuminating study, Jonathan 

Weinberg suggests that Whistler’s Mother was inspired by two etchings by Rembrandt of 

his aged mother, The Artist’s Mother Seated at a Table and The Artist’s Mother Seated, in an 

Oriental Headdress, Half Length. Weinberg suggests that Whistler’s portrait, like Rembrandt’s etchings, anticipates the death of his mother: Anna Whistler died in 1881, aged 

seventy-six, ten years after Whistler painted her.12 I want to take the idea further and 

add that the black and gray tonalities of the geometric shapes and the fl attened silhouette of the fi gure in profi le make this painted image like an ancient Greek stele, a funerary monument in relief: the British Museum has a large collection of these that Whistler 

could have seen, including Seated Woman and an Attendant (Figure 4), a representation of 

a woman in profi le, seated in a chair with a stool at her feet, which entered the museum in 1856.13 If the studio was a beautifully arranged domestic showcase and psychic 

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Whistler’s Paris Studio 97

holding space for her haunting physical absence, the 

Luxembourg Museum served as a mausoleum for the 

enduring presence of Whistler’s painting of her. Whistler may have anticipated its eventual entombment by 

using a funerary monument as a source for the pose 

of the fi gure. 

A group of etchings and lithographs mark out 

Whistler’s path through the verdant seventeenthcentury Luxembourg Gardens in front of the Luxembourg Museum. I want to concentrate on the fi ve lithographs Whistler made of the gardens (Figures 5–9) 

because they are securely dated and because they 

represent children and their nursemaids, a subject 

that, as I will argue, can be connected to Whistler’s 

memories of childhood that the Mother triggered.

14

Walking across the Notre Dames des Champs 

into the rue Joseph Bara, which continues as the rue 

Michelet, which leads to the gardens, Whistler would 

have turned left toward the museum, passing a large, 

formal sunken garden enclosed by a balustrade that 

can be accessed by an identical set of steps to the east 

and west. The Steps, Luxembourg (Figure 5) probably 

depicts the steps on the western side, in which case 

it can be grouped with The Pantheon, from the Terrace 

of the Luxembourg Gardens (Figure 6), The Terrace, Luxembourg (Figure 7), and Nursemaids: “Les Bonnes du Luxembourg” (Figure 8). The only one of the fi ve lithographs of the 

Luxembourg Gardens that does not fall into this group is Conversation under the Statue, 

Luxembourg Gardens (Figure 9), which pays homage to Whistler’s beloved Scottish wife, 

“Trixie,” because it includes the statue of Mary, Queen of Scots, situated at the edge of 

the eastern terrace. As the title suggests, The Pantheon, from the Terrace of the Luxembourg Gardens is a view from the western terrace across the gardens to the Pantheon. 

The Terrace, Luxembourg is a view to the southeast that includes a partial outline of the 

roof and the squared turret of Berger Pevrault, an apartment block at the corner of the 

rue Auguste Comte and the Avenue de la Observatoire; Nursemaids depicts a section of 

the gardens at the base of the western steps. 

All of these lithographs depict nursemaids and governesses with their charges. Did 

the proximity of the painting of his mother bring back memories of his childhood and 

inspire Whistler to draw them in the Luxembourg Gardens? If so, there is little evidence of any happy families in these images—if by “family” we mean the nuclear model 

of father, mother, and two children—because all of these prints depict surrogate mothers and absent fathers. In The Steps, Luxembourg, a young child trails several feet behind 

a female fi gure on the steps in the garden, while another is dwarfed by the group of 

men in “soft hats” gazing with interest at the entwined chubby cherubs on the elaborate jardinière; other clusters of disparate individuals, some in top hats, stand adrift at 

the top of the steps. A solitary young child, back turned, peers through the balustrade, 

ignored by the nursemaids who stand on the left in The Pantheon, from the Terrace of 

the Luxembourg Gardens. And what a spectacle of “discipline and punish” in The TerFIGURE 5. James McNeill Whistler, The Steps, Luxembourg (C.68), 1893. Lithograph, 21 × 15.7 cm. Freer 

Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 

Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1894.10.

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98 Palaces of Art

race, Luxembourg, where three nursemaids sit 

barricaded behind three chairs at right angles to 

them; a young girl with her head down, hands 

clasped, one foot partly off the ground and the 

other raised in the air, waits to escape from this 

oppressive arrangement; another nursemaid, 

wearing an identical hat to the fi rst, stands with 

arms crossed and appears to scold the young 

child looking up at her. 

These children have a timeless, universal 

signifi cance that ties them in an interesting way 

to the ideas of the French Symbolists, in particular to Paul Gauguin, whom Whistler discussed 

with Sherard.15 They also resonate with other 

meanings connected to Whistler’s own peripatetic, lonely childhood and also, perhaps, to the 

children he had with Maud Franklin, whom he 

abandoned. These points are best illustrated by 

The Nursemaids: “Les Bonnes du Luxembourg,” a 

view of the garden, the western steps fl anked by 

statues of Venus and Minerva, and the museum 

just apparent in the distance. Each distinct 

fi gure and group of fi gures in The Nursemaids is 

part of this topography but fl oats in fl at, empty 

space that gives them a timeless universality. It 

suggests to me that Whistler was consciously 

thinking about the function of space in a way 

that transcends its illusory role in traditional 

picture making. This is not so much “fl at” space, 

but “not” space—an effect Whistler sought by 

choosing a viewpoint that eliminates such details 

as the pool and the semicircles of lawn and 

fl owerbeds at the center of the garden. A young 

girl, her spindly legs straddled far apart, stands 

alone; a toddler takes a few steps, held by its 

nursemaid; a cluster of nursemaids sit with their 

charges; another nursemaid holds a young child; 

two young children play; their schematic forms 

fl oat in the space that separates each fi gure and 

group of fi gures and denies the possibility of any 

continuous narrative about an everyday event in 

the Luxembourg Gardens.

This visualization of space as an expressive 

signifi er compares to the way space is conceived 

by Stéphane Mallarmé. His close friendship 

with Whistler is well established. Their correspondence plays out the narrative of their 

FIGURE 6. James McNeill Whistler, The Pantheon, from the Terrace of the Luxembourg Gardens (C.70), 1893. Lithograph, 18.1 

× 16 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1894.12.

FIGURE 7. James McNeill Whistler, The Terrace, Luxembourg

(C.87), 1894. Lithograph, 9.8 × 21.1 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang 

Freer, F1906.171.

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Whistler’s Paris Studio 99

mutual admiration, their planned meetings, and their 

tremendous rapport; therefore, it is hardly surprising 

that Mallarmé came up in Whistler’s conversation with 

Sherard.16 Whistler called Mallarmé “a grand signeur” 

and told Sherard how it delighted him to hear Mallarmé 

speak, “as he speaks at his weekly receptions in the 

Rue de Rome ... so clear and limpid, with occasional 

hesitations, and then such phrases.” The pauses that 

Whistler described in Mallarmé’s elliptical speech can 

be compared to what has been interpreted as the 

spaces of silence in his poetry, where the white spaces 

on the page separate the short and long paragraphs and 

encircle the text with silence. Whistler reportedly was 

not a great reader, but he must have been intrigued by 

Mallarme’s claim that the black text of printed words 

interrupted the “whiteness of the page,” or, as Roger 

Pearson argues, “the blank space of the page ... offers 

some authentication of silence.” I see the intermingling 

of “lacework of the poetic text” and the “espace blanc” 

in Mallarmé’s prose and verse as the textual equivalent of the distinctive mark-making that unfolds in the 

empty, “silent” space of Whistler’s prints.17

Commenting on one of Whistler’s three “Songs on 

Stone,” The Tyresmith (C.36), which had been published 

in the Whirlwind opposite Mallarmé’s “Billet à Whistler” 

two days previously, on November 15, 1890, Mallarmé 

wrote to the artist, “All that is done in such a Whistlerian manner: the whole page, amazing! I have never 

presented to the skies the cloth of such an impeccable 

plastron; and that alongside a work by you, which, of 

the two, is the true Song. As for the brouhaha, you 

can imagine how precious that is to me, because I hear 

your voice in it.” (By “brouhaha,” Mallarmé appears to 

mean the densely worked areas of the lithograph.)18 

More dense areas of mark-making break the silent 

white space of Whistler’s Nursemaids, where the young 

girl who stands alone is engulfed by empty space. She 

is a more schematically drawn cousin of the fantastical 

children in the Walberswick seascapes by Philip Wilson 

Steer (Figure 10), the London Impressionist whose 

work, like Whistler’s, was featured in the Whirlwind 

and who belonged to the Whistler-Sickert cohort. 

Whistler’s fi gure is a performer on another kind of 

empty stage where no real narrative can be played out. 

She shares her lineage with the young girls who play 

in Steer’s fantasy seascapes, but she hovers closer to 

the banal and everyday. Not an individual, or even an 

FIGURE 8. James McNeill Whistler, Nursemaids: “Les 

Bonnes du Luxembourg” (C.81), 1894. Lithograph, 20 

× 15.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.164.

FIGURE 9. James McNeill Whistler, Conversation 

under the Statue, Luxembourg Gardens (C.69), 1893. 

Lithograph, 17.2 × 15.2 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, 

Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1894.11.

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100 Palaces of Art

individual type, her corporality dissolves into a 

cutout shape like the carefully manicured box 

in the Luxembourg Gardens. It is a haunting 

hieroglyphic of an enduring moment of childhood that transcends the material presence of 

the young girl. 

Whatever personal signifi cance the subject 

of childhood had for Whistler, he represented 

the theme of childhood in a new way by connecting its universality with the ordinary and 

everyday. I have no clear proof that Edouard 

Vuillard and Henry James were directly inspired 

by Whistler’s images, but there are noticeable 

connections in the way that both artist and 

writer, who knew and admired Whistler, took 

up the theme. I am thinking of Vuillard’s Public 

Gardens: The Interrogation (Figure 11), one of 

the panels that make up The Park or The Public 

Gardens, a privately commissioned decorative 

scheme. Although I have no proof that Vuillard 

had seen Whistler’s lithographs of the garden, 

he is known to have taken an interest in Whistler, and he also had attended Mallarmé’s “mardis” when he took up the theme in the summer 

of 1894.19 Vuillard’s project is on an entirely different scale, but it is hard not to see a connection with Whistler’s Nursemaids and its theme 

of everyday childhood. Whistler’s lithographs 

and Vuillard’s paintings represent childhood as 

a state of being, a period of life that transcends 

the individual and a single moment in time. 

Henry James expresses the same idea in 

The Ambassadors (1903), where the sculptor 

Gloriani and also, I suggest, the New Englander 

Lambert Strether are based on Whistler.20

Strether fi nds himself in the Luxembourg 

Gardens soon after his arrival in Paris, where 

“on a penny chair from which terraces, alleys, 

vistas, fountains, little trees in green tubs, little 

women in white caps, and shrill little girls at 

play all sunnily ‘composed’ together, he passed 

an hour in which the cup of his impressions 

seemed truly to overfl ow.” On a later visit to 

his Luxembourg nook, Strether has an epiphany about what James regarded as an enduring 

quantity of time “of things in a strange, vast 

order, swinging at moments off into space, 

FIGURE 10. Philip Wilson Steer, Children Paddling, Walberswick, 

1894. Oil on canvas, 64.3 × 92.6 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

FIGURE 11. Edouard Vuillard, Public Gardens: 

The Interrogation or The Questioning, 1894. 

Distemper on canvas, 214.5 × 92 cm. Musée 

d’Orsay, Paris, RF1978-47, detail. Bequest of 

Mrs. Alexander Radot in 1978.

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Whistler’s Paris Studio 101

into past and future, and then dropping fast, with some loss of breath, but with a soft, 

reassuring thud, down to yesterday and to-day.”21

The nineteenth-century children who played in the Luxembourg Gardens are long 

gone, but the children who continue to play there form one long continuum of color, 

sound, and movement from yesterday to today and into the future. It is a little bit of 

ordinary life, but it was “enough to fi ll a life.” I am citing Jean-Paul Sartre in The Age of 

Reason, where he describes the Luxembourg Gardens as “that familiar garden, always 

new, always the same, just like the sea, swept for a hundred years by the same wavelets 

of colors and of sounds. Here it all was: scurrying children, the same for a hundred years 

past, the same sunshine on the broken-fi ngered plaster queens. ... All this was so natural, so normal, so monotonous, it was enough to fi ll a life, it was life.”22

Notes

 1. [Robert Harborough Sherard], “Monsieur Whistler ‘Chez Lui,’” Press-Cuttings Book 

(MS 1047/3/1) in the Papers of Robert Harborough Sherard, Special Collections, University of Reading, Reading, UK. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from 

this source. The unsigned interview includes the heading of the Westminster Gazette

but no date: the interview makes it clear, however, that Whistler had recently moved 

into the studio, which suggests a date of April or possibly May 1893. 

 2. Robert Harborough Sherard, Twenty Years in Paris, Being Some Recollections of a Literary 

Life (London: Hutchinson, 1905), 346. Sherard and Whistler met for the last time in 

Paris at the Café Napolitain, where Sherard witnessed Whistler’s encounter with a 

bore. “‘Well, Mr. Whistler, and how are you getting on?’ said the man, approaching. 

‘I’m not,’ said Whistler, draining his glass of absinthe and putting on his hat. ‘I’m getting off’” (347).

 3. Further evidence that Sherard is the author can be found in Sherard, Twenty Years 

in Paris, 348–49, where Sherard cites the Westminster Gazette interview in part and 

remembers that he and Whistler talked for nearly an hour. Sherard was a prolifi c 

journalist who wrote on politics, art, and literature in the French and English press.

 4. Whistler referred to the following artists and writers: Jean Charles Cazin, Edgar 

Degas, Jean-Louis Forain, Phil May, John Singer Sargent, Pierre Loti, Stéphane Mallarmé, Comte Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Sherard spells 

the name “Goguin,” but the conversation makes it clear that Whistler is referring to 

Gauguin.

 5. “I remember that as I was going up to his studio, which was very high up, having 

lost count of the storeys I had climbed, I met a fat bourgeois coming down the stairs, 

and asked to be directed. ‘You must go right up to the top of the staircase,’ he said 

cheerfully. ‘On ne peut pas aller plus loin que Monsieur Whistler’—a remark which was 

both an epigram and a true appreciation” (Sherard, Twenty Years in Paris, 349).

 6. At the end of January 1883, the twenty-one-year-old Sherard helped Wilde settle 

in Paris, and four months later dedicated Whispers, a book of poems, “To Oscar 

Wilde, Poet and Friend, Affectionately and admiringly Dedicated.” They remained 

lifelong friends, and Sherard was one of the few who remained loyal to Wilde after 

his imprisonment. See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 

1987),4, 22, 113, 126, 161, 202–6, 208, 213, 218, 220, 235, 330, 439, 443, 457–8, 468, 

503, 511, 526, and 551. See also, for example, Robert Harborough Sherard, The Life of 

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102 Palaces of Art

Oscar Wilde (London: Werner Laurie, 1906) and Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy 

Friendship (London: Greening, 1909).

 7. William Rothenstein, Men and Memories, Recollections of William Rothenstein, 1872–

1900, vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1931), 86. Rothenstein fi rst met Whistler at 

the end of 1892. While in Paris in May 1893, when he visited Whistler in his studio, 

D. S. MacColl arranged for Rothenstein to undertake his fi rst commission of lithographic portraits, which were published by John Lane as Oxford Characters. Thomas 

Robert Way wrote to Whistler that “Mr Rothenstein is making some charming 

portraits on the paper, he is amazingly clever” (November 3, 1893, GUW 06101).

 8. D. S. MacColl to Elizabeth MacColl, May 12, 1893, Donald Suther MacColl Collection, University of Glasgow Library, Glasgow, Scotland, M118. MacColl wrote, 

“Pennell & I went to Whistler’s studio. He appeared through a chink of the door 

with a large palette & brushes & a look of being interrupted in masterpiece. I looked 

at the brushes & asked are they wet or dry? He stared, then relaxed into a triumph, 

& set the door open. He sat there most of the afternoon talking with Mrs Whistler 

coming in meantime for some food.”

 9. The pictures hung in Room Six, which was reserved for the most radical paintings in 

the collection. For a discussion of the layout of the collection, which was moved to 

the Orangerie adjacent to the Luxembourg Gardens in 1886, see Belinda Thomson, 

“Vainly Seeking Impressionism, a Scottish Artist’s Response to the Musée du Luxembourg c. 1894,” Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 14 (2009–2010): 92.

 10. For a detailed account of the purchase of Whistler’s Mother by the French state, 

see Margaret F. MacDonald and Joy Newton, “The Selling of Whistler’s Mother,” in 

Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon, ed. Margaret F. MacDonald (Aldershot, UK: Lund 

Humphries, 2003), 65–80.

 11. Whistler to William Whistler, February 1–14, 1892, GUW 07006, cited in MacDonald and Newton, “The Selling of Whistler’s Mother,” 65.

 12. Jonathan Weinberg, Ambition and Love in Modern American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale 

University Press, 2001), 6–7, 11. The Artist’s Mother Seated at a Table (Bartsch, Hollstein 343) and The Artist’s Mother Seated, in an Oriental Headdress, Half Length (Bartsch, Hollstein 348) were in Francis Seymour Haden’s collection and were included 

in The Collection of Prints and Drawings Formed by Mr. Francis Seymour Haden (Sotheby, 

Wilkinson and Hodge, London), June 15–18, 1891, lots 331 and 332. I am grateful to 

Nicholas Stogdon for this reference.

 13. I am grateful to Marcia Pointon for our conversation about this point.

 14. Of the eight related etchings, the majority have been dated between 1892 and 1894: 

Bébés, Jardin du Luxembourg (G.463), Under the Statue, Luxembourg Gardens (G.464), 

Balustrade, Luxembourg Gardens (G.465), The Band, Luxembourg Gardens (G.466), Polichinelle, Jardin du Luxembourg (G.467), and The Pantheon from the Terrace, Luxembourg 

Gardens (G.473). Two other etchings, Little Terrace, Luxembourg Gardens (G.443) and 

The Little Terrace, Luxembourg Gardens, No. 2 (G.444), have been tentatively dated 

1889–90.

 15. Mallarmé was a strong supporter of Gauguin, which may explain Whistler’s interest. 

The two artists probably met in 1885 in Dieppe, where they both spent part of the 

summer, and it may be that Gauguin listened to Whistler give an abridged version 

of his Ten O’Clock lecture at the Sickerts’s rented house, where Degas was among 

the invited guests. Whistler told Sherard that he had seen Gauguin’s pictures, calling 

them “strange things,” at Goupil’s in Paris: when he was in Paris that summer, he may 

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Whistler’s Paris Studio 103

have seen the 1889 Volpini show, when Gauguin showed the Volpini Suite consisting 

of eleven zincographs—lithographs printed from a zinc plate rather than the customary stone. Whistler could be usefully compared to Gauguin as a way of understanding his signifi cance within the international arena in which he moved during the 

1890s. 

 16. Whistler also referred to Pierre Loti (whom Gauguin also admired): “Was he not 

the writer of the sweetest French?”

 17. Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 3, 210. Pearson frequently compares Mallarmé’s text to lacework 

in this analysis. For an illuminating study of Mallarmé and silence, see Roger Pearson, 

Mallarmé and Circumstance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For an illuminating discussion about this mark-making process, see Martha Tedeschi, “The New 

Language of Etching in Nineteenth Century England,” in The “Writing” of Modern Life: 

The Etching Revival in France, Britain, and the U.S., 1850–1940, ed. Elizabeth Helsinger 

(Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2008), 25–38.

 18. The Whirlwind 2, no. 20 (November 15, 1890); Mallarmé to Whistler, November 17, 

1890, GUW 13451. For an illuminating analysis of Mallarmé’s “Billet à Whistler,” see 

Pearson, Mallarmé and Circumstance, 208–15.

 19. William Vaughan points out Vuillard’s interest in the work of Whistler and suggests 

that Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother may have infl uenced 

Vuillard’s Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893, Museum of Modern Art, New York): 

“A Chance Meeting of Whistler and Freud? Artists and Their Mothers in Modern 

Times,” in Whistler’s Mother: An American Icon, 107–9. 

 20. For example, James’s 1886 novel The Princess Casamassima owes more than a little to 

Whistler’s images of 1880s London. 

 21. Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903; repr., New York: New American Library, 

1960), 51, 56. 

22. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason, trans. Eric Sutton (1945; repr., London: Penguin 

Classics, 2001), 48–49.

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Other Voices, Other Rooms: 

Beyond Whistlerian Aestheticism

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Aesthetes on Display: 

“Not Masculine and Progressive 

but Reclusive and Retrospective”

Susan P. Casteras

The protest expressed in my title was registered in 1877 by critic William Michael 

Rossetti in the Academy concerning how the art of James McNeill Whistler, Edward 

Burne-Jones, and others had become controversial and nonmasculine.1

 Overall, the 

cult of Aestheticism in the 1870s and l880s was associated with connotations of sickness, 

indolence, lassitude, and sexuality that encompass myriad representations of contemporary 

femininity and masculinity—from paintings and persons on display at the Grosvenor Gallery 

to body language, interior decoration, behavior, ideals of beauty, fashion, and alternative 

notions of gendered identity. Invoking and often confl ating these varied subjects, Victorian 

critics assailed the radical imagery and aims of those artists in particular who, in high and 

low art alike, produced countless representations of Aestheticism in the form of swooning and recumbent females and equally languid males. One of the most novel aspects of 

aestheticism was the way in which its visual language suggested that gender identities were 

malleable. This was an idea that crossed multiple boundaries, from high art to fashion to 

popular culture. In the discussion that follows, however, I consider these overlapping categories separately in order to show the varied ways in which Aesthetic cognoscenti—and 

their critics—redefi ned art, beauty, and personal identity.

Aesthetic art during this period frequently focused on the female devotee but also 

lavished attention on her male counterpart. Aesthetic women summoning Rossettian 

traditions represented one ideal, with Aesthetic demeanor, attire, and materialism 

emblematic of active participation in this avant-garde, elitist movement. The “religion” of 

Aestheticism required yielding one’s life to art and completely immersing one’s identity in 

the cult of beauty. Such contemplation functioned as a potent narcotic, leaving followers 

in an addicted state, in a zone apart from reality. This “otherness” is refl ected in countless paintings and cartoons, with the solipsistic Aesthete, male or female, experiencing 

a pathological ailment that is simultaneously cultural and physical. Using languor, illness, 

eccentric appearance, and effeminacy as constructs, Victorian writers did their best—or 

perhaps worst—to berate the fi gural imagery of Whistler and Burne-Jones. Inspired 

partly by the torpor of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s embowered stunners, these two artists 

(along with Albert Moore) projected potent states of being for their protagonists and 

challenged prevailing visual conventions. 

Aesthetic Models

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s infl uence on Aesthetic female imagery derives from works 

like The Blue Bower (see Codell, Figure 3), where a drugged-looking Pre-Raphaelite 

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108 Palaces of Art

stunner is captive, trapped in a bower among other 

decorative props, fabrics, and fl owers. Both seductive 

and unattainable, she seems tantalizingly suspended in 

a trance, commodifi ed and disconnected from the real 

world, generating a libidinous appeal that some critics, as 

discussed below, deemed unhealthy and menacing. 

The Aesthetic women who followed Rossetti’s 

imprint in real life represent a new idol, pushing even 

further the concept of a female as a decorative object in 

a visual spectacle. Among the middle and upper classes, 

certain aspects of appearance and deportment became 

emblematic of dedication to the Aesthetic movement 

and its power to transform real life. In real life, some 

wore Aesthetic as well as Pre-Raphaelite–inspired fl owing fashion, striking poses that were decidedly new and 

different at Grosvenor Gallery openings and elsewhere.2

A hallmark was reverie or passivity, typically pairing female—usually drained—receptivity with inner agitation 

and longings. Thus, in Rossetti’s stunner and her living 

counterparts, or Aesthetic “sisters,” the passive female 

body outwardly appeared listless and somnambulant yet 

was understood as hiding inner sexual drives and sirenlike threats, especially as conveyed in contemporary 

poetry of various types.3

Beyond the Rossettian ideal, a renowned prototype 

for the female Aesthete from the realm of high art is 

Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl

(Figure 1). Here the artist’s mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, is displayed in Whistler’s own home, surrounded 

by Aesthetic objects such as Chinese porcelain and a 

Japanese fan. Dressed in white, she ironically functions 

like an Aesthetic bride waiting at an altar. Like her 

countless successors, she is part of the artist’s overall 

decorative scheme; ornamental, aloof, and phlegmatic, 

she and other Whistlerian females preside simultaneously as immobile goddesses and prisoners confi ned 

to a world of beauty, mirrors, and Art for Art’s Sake. 

Indebted to the Rossettian legacy, she seems even 

more sapped of energy, inscrutable, and narcissistic in 

her hermetic chamber. Is she bored, experiencing an 

inner vision, or merely yearning for something? There 

is no answer, but these lolling, seemingly expressionless women contain their power—that is, their sexual 

passion—largely by concealing or not overtly releasing 

it. This fi gure’s dreamy expression and lethargic pose, 

like her blank white dress and trendy drawing-room 

setting, are visual components that link her not only to 

FIGURE 1. James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in 

White, No. 2: The Little White Girl, 1864. Oil on canvas. 76.5 × 51.1 cm. Tate Gallery, London. Bequeathed 

by Arthur Studd. Tate, London / Art Resource, NY.

FIGURE 2. Thomas Armstrong, The Lesson, 1865. 

Oil on canvas, 79.4 × 58.7cm. Wadsworth Atheneum 

Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, Ella Gallup 

Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 

1984.5. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art / Art 

Resource, NY.

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Aesthetes on Display 109

later fi gural works by Whistler but 

also to subsequent permutations of 

both the Aesthetic female and male 

and their enervated, seemingly 

emotionless inactivity—in Punch 

magazine and elsewhere.

How different this painting is 

from a similar vignette by Whistler’s English friend Thomas Armstrong, whom he met while studying in Paris and who shared studio 

space with George Du Maurier.4 In 

The Lesson (Figure 2), Armstrong 

depicts another female poised 

at a mantelpiece adorned with 

Aesthetic accessories, her arm 

gracefully draped on the fi replace 

shrine in a reversal of Whistler’s 

composition. This woman, dressed 

in dark hues rather than gauzy 

white, is engaged in an unresolved 

drama and seems imperious, even 

stern, as she confronts a young 

girl. Unlike Whistler’s Symphony in 

White, No. 2, Armstrong’s The Lesson is still tied to narrative expectations. Yet the title is obfuscating; 

the older female serves as teacher, 

but it is unclear if “the lesson,” presumably for the crestfallen girl, is an Aesthetic one 

or something less esoteric.5

A different permutation of Aesthetic inertia with multiple fi gures is Whistler’s 

Symphony in White, No. 3 (Figure 3), with its exquisitely lounging, self-absorbed creatures 

(Hiffernan reappears at left). As scholars such as Robyn Asleson have noted, Whistler’s 

fi gural compositions of the l860s bear a strong affi nity with the work of his reclusive 

friend Albert Moore.6

 For example, paintings like Moore’s Beads (Figure 4) are replete 

with equally self-consciously feminine ultrarefi nement and weariness. Such “high art” 

images became visual inspiration for popular imagery and benchmarks for both male and 

female Aesthetic posturing, yearning, and exquisite depletion. 

Aesthetic Critics

In an 1882 book on aestheticism, Walter Hamilton earmarks as female traits fl owing 

hair, eyes with “love-lorn languor,” sunken cheeks, consuming kisses, long hands, unusual 

garb, and morbid temperament.7

 This description also applies to portrayals of male Aesthetes. Rossetti’s portrait of Jane Burden Morris in Perlascura (Figure 5) personifi es these 

facial attributes, which were imitated and ridiculed in Punch and other popular periodicals. One anonymous poem wittily describes the female Aesthete as having passionate 

FIGURE 3. James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 3, 

1865–67. Oil on canvas, 51.4 × 76.9 cm. Barber Institute of Fine 

Arts, University of Birmingham / Bridgeman Art Library.

FIGURE 4. Albert Moore, Beads, 1880. Oil on canvas, 29.8 × 

51.4 cm. © National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland / 

Bridgeman Art Library.

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110 Palaces of Art

caresses, a “sallow brow,” “hollow, parboiled eyes, ... 

heart-devouring sighs,” and “sodden, pasty cheeks.”8

“Janey” personifi ed these traits and became Rossetti’s dominant quasi-pinup, as in La Pia de’ Tolomei (ca. 

1868–70, Spencer Museum of Art). Her features and 

boneless posture symbolized the Pre-Raphaelite–inspired ideal of femininity, one that in time morphed 

into androgyny. Janey also served as the defi nitive 

visual standard-bearer for Du Maurier’s famous Punch 

cartoons spoofi ng aestheticism. In “The Six-Mark 

Tea-pot” (Figure 6), for example, a Janey clone speaks 

with her Oscar Wildean groom in an Aesthetic 

honeymoon paradise of Japanese screens, blue-andwhite china, and ebonized furniture. Another example 

is “Aesthetic Love in a Cottage” (February 19, 1881), 

featuring wildly exaggerated, haggard, prematurely 

aged—even decrepit—Janey twins with dual gaunt 

faces and bodies.

Indeed, the extremes of weariness and gauntness 

served as a volatile issue of unhealthiness among critics. 

Commentators were disturbed by the intense self-absorption and underlying sensuality affl icting Aesthetes in 

epidemic numbers. The Illustrated London News in l879 

loathed the “wan, haggard faces, ... limp languors, ... 

[and] hysterical tension” and railed against such sexually 

ambivalent creatures as those in Burne-Jones’s Beguiling of Merlin (see Deusner, Figure 3), which sustained a 

“morbid outcome ... which every man who respects 

his manhood and every woman who values her honour 

must regard with disgust.”9

 Another suspect work in this 

category was Burne-Jones’s Laus Veneris (1873–75, Laing 

Art Gallery), which critic Frederick Wedmore excoriated 

in his art column for the Academy.

10 As such criticism 

indicates, insalubrious messages were encoded both in 

the art on the walls and in the very Aesthetic bodies of 

visitors to the Grosvenor Gallery. 

Accusations of lethargy, unhealthiness, and unacceptable sensuality were at the core of public suspicions 

concerning the character—moral and otherwise—of 

those beings branded Aesthetic in real life and in art. A 

lack of wholesomeness rendered both sexes susceptible 

to Aesthetic malaise. Some reactions verged on hysteria, 

as when Harry Quilter of Macmillan’s Magazine attacked 

the movement’s “morbid and sickly art-results,” causing 

“evil” to spread “from pictures and poems into private 

life. ... There may now be seen at many a social gathering 

young men and women whose lacklustre eyes, disheveled 

FIGURE 5. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Perlascura, 1871. 

Pastel on paper, 55.9 × 36.2 cm. Ashmolean Museum, 

University of Oxford.

FIGURE 6. George Du Maurier, “The Six-Mark Teapot,” 

Punch, October 30, 1880. Collection of the author.

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Aesthetes on Display 111

hair, eccentricity of attire, and general appearance of weary passion proclaim them members 

of the new school.”11

Repeatedly, sickness—associated with feminine indolence—connoted debilitation or 

enervation as a result of sexual activity or desire. Although the Aesthetic female seems 

outwardly fragile, she was perceived in seemingly contradictory ways: fi rst, as possessing 

a lethal, insatiable sexual appetite akin to that of Rossetti’s femmes fatales and, second, 

as lacking in maternal instincts. Moreover, Aestheticism was viewed as emasculating 

contemporary manhood, art, and society. As the Magazine of Art critic despaired in l88l, 

“Effeminacy, even when it is associated with some Aesthetic sentiment, is not a wholesome moral temper.”12 The underlying problem with the Aesthetic affect was thus its 

feminine qualities (high-strung emotionalism, posing, decorativeness, and narcissism) 

and how these factors impaired masculinity. Thus, the same writer complained, “Effeminacy ... is distinctly unwholesome. ... No more complete antithesis to the honourable, 

self-respecting masculine character could be found.”13

Aesthetic Parodies

In the realm of popular culture, both sexes reiterate certain visible manifestations of 

Aestheticism, notably pretentious intensity, soulful and simpering expressions, illness, and 

fl accid body and mind. These ideas are mostly 

expressed in parodied form in periodicals like 

Punch, not in fi ne-art paintings, with Du Maurier 

as the key exponent. Popular images transmit a 

degree of gender-bending androgyny that showcases Aesthetic signifi ers like slouching posture, 

nervous, fl uttering hands, hypersensitivities to 

art and poetry, and “chinamania.” Such affectations are satirized, for example, in a comic 

quartet of Christmas cards by A. J. Ludovici. 

In one, an effete male (or masculinized young 

woman) gazes at a lily; he reappears gazing at a 

sunfl ower, “with yearnings for your intense joy” 

(Figure 7). In yet another image, a woman holds 

a teapot and interacts with a sunfl ower, both 

recurrent Aesthetic motifs invoking women’s 

traditional interaction with fl owers or teapots 

in gardens and parlors. However, when a male 

did these things, his actions were considered 

unmanly and unnatural. An extreme statement 

of this is embodied in a teapot by James Hadley 

(1881–82, Victoria and Albert Museum). On 

one side is a mustached male Aesthete with a 

sunfl ower, and on the other, sharing a limpwristed spout, a woman (or an androgynous 

young man) with a lily.14

On the male side of the Aesthetic equation, the single fi gure who exemplifi es and 

FIGURE 7. A. J. Ludovici, “With Yearnings for Your Intense 

Joy,” Aesthetic Christmas card, ca. 1880. © Victoria and Albert 

Museum, London.

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112 Palaces of Art

lionizes the male acolyte was undoubtedly 

Whistler’s friend and foe, Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s 

passion for fl owers was satirized in countless 

forms, such as Linley Sambourne’s famous 1881 

“Fancy Portrait No. 37,” featuring Wilde with 

a sunfl ower (Punch, June 25, 1881). Along these 

lines, Du Maurier’s “Aesthetic Midday Meal” of 

the previous year (August 17, 1880) included 

the Wildean poet Jellaby Postlethwaite ordering 

water for his withering lily and staring rapturously at it. Female Aesthetes suffered from the 

same fl ora mania, as in the sheet music cover 

for “The Colonel Waltz” (Figure 8). A garishly 

adorned female leans on a mantelpiece, her 

pose and tawdry garb hinting at Whistler’s 

prototype. Her gown’s divided folds scandalously emphasize her legs, while a tassel creates 

a phallic shape that suggestively hangs over her 

genitalia and makes her seem indecent, not 

ladylike at all. Products such as this sheet music 

and the extraordinary teapot suggest how Aestheticism was also a commercial phenomenon, 

with Aesthetes the consumers of commodities 

as well as objects of desire in their own right.

Male and female Aesthetes alike suffered 

from a “soulfully intense, despairing droop,” an 

anemic pallor, affected, melancholic looks, and 

messy hair, often adorning themselves in feminine accessories.15 Smitten by the “sickness” of Art for Art’s Sake, countless worn-out 

practitioners languish in art in slumping positions or worshipful stances before objects 

they idolatrously adore and fetishize. Typically, they seem spent by life and the pleasures 

of living for art’s sake. 

The result of such pretentiousness and artifi ciality was a widespread scrambling of 

gendered identities, with men becoming visibly effeminate and women either neutered or 

zombielike. Each sex was lampooned, but with men, the ridicule was mostly hinted at as 

homosexual.16 For a Patience playbill, the impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte linked “unmanly oddities” with “a clique of professors of ultra-refi nement, who preach the gospel 

of morbid languor and sickly sensuousness ... distinguished by an eccentricity of taste 

tending to an unhealthy admiration for exhaustion, corruption, and decay.”17 Overall, Du 

Maurier’s personae reconfi gured the gender-bending results of the Aesthetic experience. 

Virility is defl ated to something “wan, limp, and haggard,” whereas feminine susceptibility 

is confl ated with superfi cial beauty, fads, and sexual degeneracy. Followers were plagued 

by what critic Frederick Wedmore described in 1878 as “yearnings not to be gratifi ed 

because they are insatiable.”18 Gender differences were reinscribed and literally blurred, 

making it vexing to discern which fi gure is male and which female since both seem inspired by Jane Morris and Oscar Wilde.

FIGURE 8. Sheet music cover for “The Colonel Waltz” by E. 

Bucaslossi. Color lithograph by Stannard and Son. Published by 

Hopwood and Crew, 1881. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

Gift of Mrs. Belinda Rudd. © Victoria and Albert Museum, 

London.

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Aesthetic Spaces

Most Punch Aesthetic cartoons reiterate specifi c 

strategic sites, typically the home, radicalizing them 

in new ways. The domestic sphere was no longer 

portrayed as the exclusive domain of the female, 

for both men and women were portrayed coveting 

identical objects and possessing a strong desire to 

decorate to express personal fulfi llment.19 Both 

sexes spurned an active or vigorous outdoor life, 

preferring instead to languish indoors as part of the 

decorative scheme. Separate spheres merge, and 

activities once ascribed to women—like selecting 

handsome objects for the home or communing with 

fl owers—became mutual joys invested with new 

meaning by Aesthetic men. These cultural duties 

originally belonging to women are refl ected in Gustavus Bouvier’s In the Morning: Three Young Ladies in an 

Aesthetic Interior (1877, private collection), in which 

three female “curators,” as acolytes at the altar of 

beauty, dust, water a fl oral piece, and lean meaningfully against a mirrored mantelpiece in emulation of 

Whistler’s Little White Girl.

20

Boundaries overlap and collide when the parlor 

or drawing room is so contentiously altered—

sometimes neutralized—changing the ways that 

men in particular respond to and coexist within 

these settings. In Belgravia: A London Magazine, a 

self-described philistine visits the home of “people of culture,” where “he observes 

the fans, the vases, and the oriental blue: he masters all the outward visible signs of 

aesthetic generation.” As a result, he devises a recipe for “true culture”: “one pomegranate wall-paper; one bordered carpet; ... one dozen Japanese fans; a selection of 

poems by Messrs. Gosse, Rossetti, Swinburne, ... and artist’s proofs of Mr. Whistler’s 

etchings.”21

Many Punch cartoons reaffi rm these ideas about male followers in particular. An 

excellent example is “Intellectual Epicures” of 1876 (Figure 9), another covert allusion 

(perhaps recognizable to the cognoscenti) of Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 2. The 

text describes “the dilettante DeTomkyns” as “steeped in Aesthetic Culture, and surrounded by artistic wall-papers, Blue China, Japanese fans, medieval snuff-boxes, and his 

favourite periodicals of the eighteenth century.” The exemplary Aesthete “boasts that he 

never reads a newspaper, and that the events of the outer world possess no interest for 

him whatever.” Not reading a newspaper allies this poseur with upper-class women, who 

were discouraged from reading anything but the society pages. DeTomkyns’s conspicuous 

idleness underscores his rejection of manly labor and embrace of overrefi nement and 

dandifi ed artifi ce.

This intellectual epicure channels Whistler’s canvas in its pose, decorations, and “feminized” situation. Absorbed in his solitary pleasures, thoughts, and pursuits, DeTomkyns, 

FIGURE 9. George Du Maurier, “The Aesthete (Intellectual 

Epicures),” Punch, February 5, 1876. Collection of the 

author.

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114 Palaces of Art

too, holds a Japanese fan and rests one 

arm on the mantel. He wears garb similar to that donned by Wilde and other 

Aesthetes, but it is his signal listlessness 

and psychological disconnectedness, a 

detachment into the rarefi ed world of 

art, that make him a kindred spirit to 

Whistler’s Little White Girl. These things 

essentially make him “womanish,” for 

Du Maurier has appropriated the femininity of Whistler’s painting and rearticulated it in a transgressive way. 

Punch magazine offers many parallel 

incarnations of Aesthetic masculinity 

and taste. In another 1880s cartoon 

by Du Maurier, “An Infelicitous Question,” an eponymous Aesthetic Youth 

proclaims, “I hope by degrees to have 

this room fi lled with nothing but the 

most beautiful things.”22 These words 

are uttered by a foppish man aspiring to 

beauty himself, in Oscar Wildean attire 

and demeanor. The mutual passion, if not the competition, between men and women for 

Aesthetic objects is another of Du Maurier’s recurrent themes. In “The Passion for Old 

China” (Punch, May 2, 1874), a husband envies his wife and her supposed maternal ways: 

“I think you might let me nurse that teapot a little NOW, Margery!” Despite her “halo,” 

this lady subverts the Madonna and Child tradition by embracing a thing, not a babe, in 

her arms.

This identifi cation with and appropriation of feminine behavior takes a different turn 

in a “Nincompoopiana” cartoon of December 20, 1879, depicting another encounter 

among males, the sycophantic Grigsby, Muffi ngton, and friends. Two young men reclining 

on the right and one lounging on the left mimic the lolling, languid ladies who populate 

Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 3, as well as Moore’s formal experiments, such as An 

Open Book (Figure 10). Nonmuscular and unathletic, such depleted dandies qualify as 

conduits of female debilitation and ennui.

The indulgences, pretensions, and excesses of aestheticism affl icted countless 

adherents, and Du Maurier as well as Whistler invariably staged these scenes in parlors 

or drawing rooms. Some critics perceived the signifi cance of this site as a Victorian 

institution, with T. Martin Wood claiming in 1913 that this was a chamber, or “stage,” 

on which “everyone seemed to live for appearances.” He believed aestheticism was “a 

man’s movement” ruined by women “heaping masses of drapery on the mantel-piece.”23

Wood’s assertions about the contributions of men to this phenomenon are confi rmed by 

important architects and interior designers like E. W. Godwin.24 Talia Schaffer explains 

how Wilde personifi ed this phenomenon by conspicuously identifying with the women’s 

world as one of the “male Aesthetes [who] saw themselves as radical reformist outsiders 

invading a fi eld that already belonged to women. To justify this behavior, they had to create a visual style which metonymically associated themselves with women while distinctly 

FIGURE 10. Albert Moore, An Open Book, ca. 1884. Watercolor on paper, 42.2 × 31.2 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, 

London / Bridgeman Art Library.

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Aesthetes on Display 115

affi rming their superiority.”25

Wood, furthermore, argues that Du Maurier “succeeded in making ... Punch into 

a work of criticism on the domestic art of the nineteenth century.”26 It is precisely this 

domestic realm of the drawing room that dominates both Punch and painted interpretations of the Aesthetic movement. Aesthetic men reinscribed the female paradigm, 

transgressing gender boundaries and reinventing the drawing room as belonging to both 

sexes. There men cherished the same cultural props as women, revamped domesticity, 

and made the drawing room a testing ground as well as contested ground, a place where 

drooping Aesthetes of both sexes could languish together. 

The drawing room was a place where male and female Aesthetes interacted and 

where relationships were complicated because of the dynamics of power. The male 

weakling was “soft”—in many ways like a woman and deeply infl uenced by feminine values and roles. Margaret Stetz postulates that as a result, male 

Aesthetes were ‘handicapped’ in the eyes of other men by their 

very connection with women—feminized and thus despised 

by association, which, in turn, helped to equalize the balance 

of power in intersexual friendships...Ladies may have ruled 

drawing rooms and at homes... but they depended on Aesthetic 

male visitors to mediate between them and the infl uential sites 

where opinions were actually produced and from which they 

were shut out as effectively as from spheres of business and 

commerce.27

Along these lines, Aesthetic men were more likely to be considered connoisseurs or art 

experts, whereas their female counterparts were demoted to amateur status.

FIGURE 11. George Du Maurier, “A Love-Agony. Design by Maudle. (With Verses by Jelleby Postlethwaite, Who is 

Also Said to Have Sat for the Picture.),” Punch, June 5, 1880.

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Aesthetic Androgyny

What happened in pictorial terms when the poles of masculinity and femininity converged in the parlor or other socially approved places? One result was androgyny, as Du 

Maurier suggests in “Love-Agony” (Figure 11), in which the artist Maudle’s curiously sexless 

fi gure (the poet Postlethwaite as Narcissus) mournfully reclines. Resembling an exhausted 

Wilde, this androgyne wears a wreathlet of fl owers and a draped toga reminiscent of those 

worn by Albert Moore’s frequently recumbent female protagonists.

Occasionally, women were described as masculinized by an Aesthetic environment; 

for example, Hamilton described Du Maurier’s “all-alike-at-the-price young ladies, ... 

whose ... female beauty consists of one stereotyped face at the top of an abnormally 

tall ... fi gure ... over six feet in height.”28 Such comments suggest that lanky, oversized 

Aesthetic females were more like men. The opposite— a man as a woman—appears in 

an engraving of 1886, The White Feather by J. Bernard Partridge (Figure 12). Here Whistler is shown costumed in a dress, quoting the pose and gown of his then-mistress Maud 

Franklin in a lost portrait, Harmony in Black, No. 10 (ca. 1886; YMSM 357). His related 

FIGURE 13. James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in 

White and Black, ca. 1876. Oil on canvas, 191.4 × 90.9 

cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.78.

FIGURE 12. J. Bernard Partridge, The White Feather, 

1886. Wood engraving. Press cutting from the Department of Special Collections, Glasgow University 

Library. Reproduced in Eric Denker, In Pursuit of a Butterfl y: Portraits of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, 

DC: National Portrait Gallery, 1995), 84.

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Aesthetes on Display 117

Arrangement in White and Black (Figure 13) 

displayed a different, more sheathlike dress 

paired with a similarly assertive, rather 

cocky, confrontational pose deemed “vulgar 

in action” by the Magazine of Art.

29 This rare 

imagining of Whistler in a transvestite mode 

is provocatively titled; whether the gown 

was a comment on the wearer, the impact 

of the Aesthetic movement, the art Whistler created, artistic cowardice, or a tacit 

reference to the era’s gender crisis remains 

open.30 Perhaps the Aesthetic body was not 

just a badge of the movement but a work of 

art on display—a form of exhibit as well as 

exhibitionism. 

There were more androgynous permutations, as in “Nincompoopiana: The Mutual 

Admiration Society” (Figure 14), in which 

a reception functions as a site of both Aesthetic interchange and transformation. Here 

Postlethwaite is mobbed by fawning Janey 

clones. One man asks, “What’s there beautiful about him?” to which the social climber 

Mrs. Cimabue Brown replies, “Look at his 

grand head and poetic face, those fl owerlike 

eyes, and that exquisite sad smile. Look at his 

slender willowy frame as yielding and fragile as 

a woman’s. That’s young Maudle, standing just 

behind him—the great painter ... is he not 

divine?” Identities vacillate between poles of 

masculinity and femininity, as with Partridge’s 

image. Here Janey’s strong-jawed, ruinously 

hardened, masculine features recur in other 

women and men. In this arena, men clearly 

have become more feminine and are admired 

by Mrs. Brown for precisely this reason. Part 

of the message seems to be that the pleasures 

and excesses of committing to Aestheticism 

drain both sexes, but especially men.

A macabre fi nale to the blending of 

male and female Aesthetes into ambiguous 

sexuality appears in a strange cartoon titled 

“The Sage-Green Sickness” from the London 

seriocomic periodical Judy (Figure 15). This 

image strikes a grim note in its variation on 

the Whistlerian Aesthete posed at a parlor 

mantel. Beauty, along with Aesthetic materiFIGURE 14. George Du Maurier, “Nincompoopiana: The Mutual 

Admiration Society,” Punch, February 14, 1880. Collection of the 

author.

FIGURE 15. “The Sage-Green Sickness,” Judy, the London 

Serio-Comic Periodical, September 15, 1880. Collection of the 

author.

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118 Palaces of Art

alism, has taken a mortal toll. The accouterments are familiar, but this occupant has 

succumbed to Aesthetic “sickness.” Emaciation, anxiety, and lethargy have desexualized 

and toppled the fragile Aesthete, who is not just drooping but enfeebled, collapsed into 

a twisted heap. Despite the fact that the fi gure wears a dress, the gaunt, grotesquely 

anorectic face seems androgynous. This Aesthete is dying for the sake of art: the drawing 

room has become a death chamber. The body of Aesthetic pleasure is paradoxically a 

vessel of disease infecting this fashionable pseudocorpse.

Conclusion

Whatever the environment, both men and women are depicted as fervid consumers 

of Aesthetic art and ardent believers in a secular religion of beauty. In rejecting ordinary life, dress, and goals, they share certain symptoms, such as sorrowful expressions, 

simpering poses, a tendency to swoon, pretentiousness, lassitude, and altered gender 

effects. Visually, they are related in body and behavior, highly stylized, mannered, and 

blended, even neutered, in ways that emphasize a particular debt to Whistler’s Little 

White Girl. Identity is fl uid, and the range of these images reveals how interior lives and 

lives in interiors were intimately interconnected. If the listless beauty in “The SageGreen Sickness” were to look in the mirror, she might see not only herself but also 

the many body doubles—female, male, and androgynous—who echo her as literal and 

metaphorical refl ections of the Aesthetic movement. The setting promotes this transformation, for although the Grosvenor Gallery was the consummate location to contemplate art, the drawing room turned out to be a porous territory welcoming incursions 

of masculinity, a site where Aesthetes ultimately brought their beliefs home. In the end, 

Aesthetic cognoscenti produced distinctive culture even as they risked the ravages of 

acid allegations, infi rm health, and other negative forces to cultivate radical self-images 

and bring infusions of creativity, materialist yet artful consumption, and veneration of 

beauty to the late Victorian era.

Notes

 1. William Michael Rossetti, “Fine Art. The Grosvenor Gallery,” Academy, May 5, 1877, 

396. I began my research on gendered ideas as conveyed by Aesthetic acolytes in the 

early 1980s, but I am indebted to numerous newer scholarly investigations, which 

include the following: Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); Elizabeth 

Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale 

University Press, 2007); Kathy Alexis Psomiades, Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Talia 

Schaffer and Kathy Psomiades, eds., Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville: 

University of Virginia Press, 1999); Alan Sinfi eld, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar 

Wilde and the Queer Movement (London: Cassell, 1994).

 2. On Aesthetic fashion, see, e.g., Talia Schaffer, “Fashioning Aestheticism by Aestheticizing Fashion: Wilde, Beerbohm, and the Male Aesthetes’ Sartorial Codes,” Victorian 

Literature and Culture 28 (2000): 39–54. Other works include Joanne Entwistle, The 

Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Geoffrey Squire, et al., Simply Stunning: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of 

Dressing (Cheltenham, UK: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museums,1996).

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 3. These poems range from the high art of Algernon Swinburne, e.g., “Faustine,” to 

doggerel printed in Punch and similar publications. For specifi c examples of the 

lighter verse, see Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art 

(London: Associated University Press, 1987), 161. 

 4. On these intersecting friendships, see Eric Denker, In Pursuit of the Butterfl y: Portraits 

of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 1995), 30–32.

 5. These paintings were compared in a different context by Linda Merrill in The Peacock 

Room: A Cultural Biography (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1998), 65.

 6. Robyn Asleson, Albert Moore (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), 118–21.

 7. Walter Hamilton, The Aesthetic Movement in England (London, 1882), 24.

 8. Quoted in Hamilton, Aesthetic Movement, 25.

 9. “The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibition,” Illustrated London News, May 3, 1879, 415.

 10. For additional details, see Wedmore’s comments and those by Henry James in The 

Nation as discussed in Susan P. Casteras, “Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle 

at the Palace of the Aesthetes,” in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian 

England, ed. Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 1996), 84–85.

 11. Harry Quilter, “The New Renaissance; or, The Gospel of Intensity,” Macmillan’s Magazine, September 1880, 392–93.

 12. “The Winter Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery,” Magazine of Art 4 (1881): 180.

13. “Winter Exhibition,” 180.

 14. A provocative interpretation of the object is Anne Anderson’s “‘Fearful Consequences ... of Living up to One’s Teapot’: Men, Women and ‘Cultchah’ in the Aesthetic Movement,” in Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and 

Crafts, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010) 111–129. 

 15. Lionel Lambourne, The Aesthetic Movement (London: Phaidon Press, 1996), 114.

 16. The situation was complex, as Alan Sinfi eld indicates, writing that “the aesthete was 

regarded as effeminate—but not ... as distinctively homosexual” (The Wilde Century, 

90).

 17. Quoted in Lambourne, Aesthetic Movement, 123.

 18. Frederick Wedmore, “Some Tendencies in Recent Painting,” Temple Bar 53 (1878): 

338.

 19. Some interesting revisionist perspectives on domesticity and masculinity are found 

in John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).

 20. This work is reproduced in Charlotte Gere, The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the 

Aesthetic Interior, with Lesley Hoskins (London: Lund Humphries, 2000), 15.

 21. “The Philistine Turns,” Belgravia: A London Magazine 49, no. 194 (December 1882): 

155, 157.

22. This cartoon appeared as an illustration in George Du Maurier’s English Society, fi rst 

published in America in 1886.

 23. T. Martin Wood, George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians: A Review of His Art 

and Personality (London: Chatto and Windus, 1913), 55, 56.

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120 Palaces of Art

 24. See, for example, Talia Schaffer, “The Women’s World of British Aestheticism” (PhD 

diss., Cornell University, 1996), notably chap. 2, “The Home is the Proper Sphere for 

the Man: Inventing Interior Design, 1870–1910.”

 25. Schaffer, “Fashioning Aestheticism,” 42.

 26. Wood, Du Maurier, 68.

 27. Margaret D. Stetz, “Debating Feminism from a Feminist Perspective,” in Women and 

British Aestheticism, 28–29.

 28. Hamilton, Aesthetic Movement, 76.

 29. “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Magazine of Art 1 (1878): 51. Arrangement in White and Black 

is briefl y discussed in Margaret MacDonald, Susan Galassi, Aileen Ribeiro, and Patricia 

de Montfort, Whistler, Women, and Fashion (New York: Frick Collection, 2003), 135.

 30. Denker, In Pursuit of the Butterfl y, 83, queried this work’s ambiguity, asking whether 

the title was “simply a reference to the famous white lock [of Whistler’s hair] or a 

veiled reference to the cowardice that the feather implied to a Victorian audience?”

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Displaying Aestheticism’s 

Bric-a-Brac: Rossetti’s Material 

and Virtual Goods

Julie Codell

Much has been written on the confl ict 

within Aestheticism between its tendencies to reject popular commodity 

culture and at the same time try to reshape 

and direct consumer tastes.1 I argue here that 

this contradiction can be reexamined through 

an analysis of images of material culture in 

Victorian paintings, focusing on Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings of the 1860s. Unlike 

his coevals such as James McNeill Whistler, 

Frederic Leighton, and William Holman Hunt, 

who competed with popular goods by creating 

more beautiful objects in art, Rossetti (Figure 

1) often depicted intentionally strange, secondhand, and unfashionable objects, the antithesis 

of acceptable Victorian good taste. He blurred 

distinctions between high and popular culture, 

rejected the use of goods as signs of wealth 

and status, and asserted the artist’s aesthetic 

authority to sanctify even secondhand objects. 

His fi gures wear bricolaged outfi ts and incorrectly draped oriental dress and jewelry and 

inhabit domestic settings that are both familiar 

and uncanny. Rossetti deployed the aesthetic of 

“strangeness” advocated by Walter Pater to destabilize his spectators’ notions about material goods and conventional beauty. In this way Rossetti infl ected Aestheticism, bringing 

this movement into a critical relationship with popular culture.2

Rossetti’s paintings suggest new ways to represent material goods and new ways to 

explore the virtual in art, also explored by other artists. In his portraits, for instance, 

Whistler creates a costume for his subject that does not simply mimic Victorian dress.3

As Ian Jenkins has shown, both Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema combined 

ceramics from different historical periods into one painting, creating an anachronistic 

time and place.4 They also changed the pots’ original shapes and colors from the British 

Museum originals, creating their own virtual worlds that clearly alluded to valuable objects but changed their depicted forms and temporal order. 

FIGURE 1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, photograph by Lewis Carroll, 

1863. Albumen print. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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122 Palaces of Art

In this context, the “virtual” can be defi ned as a set of structures of meaning 

detached from the physical structures of the objects to which they refer.5 In art, “depiction” means a reference to an actual object, whereas “representation” uses signs to 

stand for things and comment on what is depicted. The virtual, however, takes images 

beyond material references and refers to our capacity to subject them to imaginative, 

free, and playful treatment. I apply virtual when images do not simply refer to actual objects but transform them in size, shape, and color, making them explicitly unlike mundane 

things in shops and parlors. In this way spaces in paintings, whether domestic interiors 

(in Whistler’s case) or mytho-historical sites (for Leighton and Alma-Tadema), suggest 

a utopia outside Victorian historicism whose dominant notion of history as progress 

demanded strict chronology. 

Whistler, Leighton, and Alma Tadema attempted to improve on real life, to create 

more beautiful classical pottery or modern dress, demonstrating their superior taste 

and aesthetic authority through their art. Whistler’s combination of Japanese robes and 

Chinese pots still complied with popular notions of “the ensemble,” objects organized 

together by manufacturers and retailers into an economy of order that signifi ed wealth, 

taste, and status. The ensemble was a metasystem for organizing goods across all venues—museums, advertising, shop windows, and parlors—and across all aesthetic categories from middle-class consumer culture to aestheticism to the Arts and Crafts movement. It structured how things were to be worn or used and was a principle of social and 

aesthetic organization across all venues. Aestheticist artists accepted the principle and 

created ensembles that were more beautiful and imaginative than those encountered in 

homes, shops, and advertisements. 

Rossetti went further than his contemporaries in his creation of a virtual world by 

removing allusions to temporality, juxtaposing unusual secondhand things from diverse 

histories and geographies, and creating a spatial claustrophobia that underscored the 

uncanniness of his overscaled fi gures and the dense profusion of disparate objects. 

Unlike other artists’ tasteful ensembles, Rossetti’s strategy was to recall both aesthetic 

and commercial display venues to express his aesthetic authority through “disensembling” displays of jewelry and dress. In the end, his paintings were less about material 

objects than about their signifi cance accrued through memory and desire, which could 

be explored in the free-fl oating nature of the virtual that is disconnected not only from 

physical references but also from cultural and social references.

The Rhetoric of Display

Display is a language, producing meanings through the similarities and differences of 

juxtaposed objects in a kind of syntax of material goods. Rossetti exploited possibilities 

inherent in the very display of goods in his own home by engaging with new modes of 

display in commercial shops and advertisments, in cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, and in domestic venues, like the middle-class parlor. Rossetti fi lled his 

Chelsea home, Tudor House, with disparate furniture, mirrors (many convex), ceramics, 

and bric-a-brac, mixing high culture and commercial objects, creating almost a parody of 

Victorian parlors (Figure 2). His studio assistant Henry Treffry Dunn compared Rossetti’s drawing room to a shop, with its “Indian cabinets, old Nankin and miscellaneous 

odds and ends.” The bedroom had items “out of an old furnishing shop somewhere in 

the slums of Lambeth,” Hammersmith, or Leicester Square and cupboard shelves disWhistlerBook.indb 122 WhistlerBook.indb 122 9/9/13 2:3

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Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac 123

playing “a medley of brass-repoussé dishes, blue china vases fi lled with peacocks’ feathers, 

oddly-fashioned early English and foreign candlesticks, Chinese monstrosities in bronze 

... the whole surmounted by an ebony and ivory crucifi x.” The parlor contained “Chinese black-lacquered panels, bearing designs ... in gold relief, ... old blue Dutch tiles ... 

[and] an old English china cupboard.”6 Rossetti’s friend T. Hall Caine described “outlandish and unheard-of books” in “most admired disorder” and “antiquarian and Oriental 

oddities ... , old carved heads and grinning gargoyles, and Burmese and Chinese Buddhas 

in soapstone of every degree of placid ugliness” (italics mine).7 A posthumous auction 

catalogue of Rossetti’s things itemized them as Indian, Japanese, Albanian, Venetian, 

Chinese, and Irish, including a chair “formerly belonging to the Chinese Giant ‘Chang.’”8

Rossetti owned twenty-fi ve cabinets (some housing mini-cabinets), chests, and cupboards, and thirty-one glasses and mirrors.9

 His mirrors paralleled those in department 

stores and shops; his glass cases resonated with cabinets of curiosity, museums, and junk 

stores, their contents “suffi cient to stock a small window.”10 As Jessica Feldman notes, 

“Almost everything in the house is out of context, collected from other places, times, 

and cultures,” which together threw “the sentimental context of ‘home’ into high relief. 

... His feelings about them provide the only aesthetic principle informing his acts of 

acquisition and arrangement.”11 

Although popular advice books in the 1870s and 1880s suggested that home decoration revealed an occupant’s expertise in “beauty,” Rossetti’s things—“weird,” “outlandish,” “unheard-of,” and disorderly—were sanctioned by his own taste, not by fashion, 

commerce, or classifi cation systems of any kind.12 They refl ected Tudor House’s mixed 

functions: studio, gallery, literary salon, family home, stage set, and “shelter from nature.” 

Rossetti domesticated foreign objects, too, through their placement in his studio residence and by renaming them—for example, calling Chinese blue-and-white pots “hawthorn pots,” which he collected and whose patterns appear in The Blue Bower (Figure 3).13

FIGURE 2. Henry Treffry Dunn, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Theodore Watts-Dunton , 1882. Gouache and watercolor, 

54.3 × 81.9 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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The Rhetoric of Adornment

In his paintings, Rossetti’s objects, which 

he calls “queer details,” purposely challenge 

Victorian protocol for use or wear.14 The 

depiction of jewelry, in particular, exemplifi es 

both Rossetti’s invocation of propriety and his 

defi ance of it. As Marcia Pointon notes, jewelry 

marks the wearer’s taste, status, and wealth, 

linking perception, aesthetics, and economics.15 Stones had designated purposes—coral 

for cameos, tortoiseshell for combs, jet for 

mourning. Global trade and archaeological 

discoveries inspired new styles, prompting new 

protocol. Oversized jewelry was considered 

peasant-like or ostentatious. Victorian jewelry 

protocol exemplifi es Judith Butler’s notion of 

a “highly rigid regulatory frame” created from 

“a set of repeated acts” that constructed class 

and gender through the language of personal 

adornment.16

Jewelry in Rossetti’s art resisted the 

“regulatory frame.” He preferred European and 

Asian folk jewelry, like the seventeenth-century 

German or Tyrolean silver belt in Astarte Syriaca

of 1876–77.17 He adored cheap costume jewelry 

from curiosity shops and “was not averse to 

using theatrical pieces ... if he thought it would 

create the right effect in his paintings.”18 In 

March 1873, he asked Dunn to fi nd, for The 

Beloved (The Bride) (Figure 4), “a big showy jewel 

of the diamond kind ... a theatrical jewel ... for 

a few shillings in Bond Street,” preferably heart 

shaped.19 The brooch, a commercial piece, 

resembles central European peasant jewelry; its 

function was later redefi ned when it became a 

pendant on a chain around Fanny Cornforth’s 

neck in The Blue Bower.

20 Although it is part of 

a parure set, Rossetti never depicts the parure 

items together: to depict the complete set 

would have been coded as being fashionable. 

Instead, Rossetti places one piece, a fragment 

of the set in The Blue Bower amid a jumble of 

disparate things, breaking up the syntax of the 

parure and defying jewelry protocol. In The Beloved, meanwhile, the bride wears a headpiece sometimes labeled Peruvian, sometimes Chinese (it is Chinese), and a gold and ruby 

bracelet, catalogued by the Victoria and Albert Museum as mid-nineteenth-century south 

FIGURE 3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blue Bower, 1865. Oil on 

canvas, 84 × 70.9 cm. © Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University 

of Birmingham / Bridgeman Art Library.

FIGURE 4. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Beloved (The Bride), 

1865–66. Oil on canvas, 82.5 × 76.2 cm. Tate Britain, London.

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Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac 125

Indian or Burmese.21 Rossetti 

considered the black child to 

be part of his ensemble and 

wrote to his patron George 

Rae, “I mean the colour of my 

picture to be like jewels, and 

the jet would be invaluable.”22 

But this boy’s place in a wedding party means he cannot refer to jet as a sign of mourning. 

Furthermore, like the bride, he 

wears an incongruous combination: a Norwegian marriage 

pendant on his head and a North African pendant around his neck.23

One period book on gems describes how “oriental” women “wreathe [gems] in their 

tresses, clasp them round their throats, their arms, their waists, decorate their bosoms, 

ears, fi ngers, ankles, and even ... their very toes and nostrils with them.”24 In Rossetti’s 

paintings, fi gures wear jewelry in some of these ways, orientalizing their appearance. The 

pearl swirl pin, Rossetti’s favorite piece, appears in “tresses,” as do pins and other items, 

beginning with Bocca Baciata (1859), the fi rst of his female portraits. Monna Vanna clasps 

her necklace around her throat. Objects are deterritorialized: the kimono worn incorrectly in The Beloved, the koto one string short and not properly played in The Blue Bower. 

This “miswearing” of objects, I argue, is a strategic defi ance of conventions and the social 

identities they signify. Instead, Rossetti’s paintings transform cheap goods into beautiful 

things by virtue of the artist’s alchemical aesthetic authority (a topic that Sally-Anne Huxtable considers in connection to Whistler’s redecoration of the Peacock Room). 

Furthermore, such items—often secondhand—were not considered appropriate for 

art. Portraits of women amid Asian objects typically display wealth and status through 

fashionable ensembles, as in John Atkinson Grimshaw’s Day Dreams (Figure 5) or Whistler’s La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (see Deusner, Figure 2). Most Aesthetes advocated a tasteful unity of things, but Rossetti preferred medleys of strange things, whose 

juxtapositions remained outside references to fashion or status but permitted new 

aesthetic meanings to emerge. 

Asian things, whether as cheap English spin-offs or authentic, well-crafted objects, 

could signal good or bad taste. Things had designated meanings, but they were also 

free-fl oating signifi ers whose meanings could be invented and whose worth could be affected by manufacturing, retailing, fashion, ads, and art. Rossetti’s collection and paintings, for instance, anticipated the rise in popularity of peasant jewelry, fi rst exhibited 

in the 1862 London International Exhibition and highlighted fi ve years later at the 1867 

Paris Exposition Universelle, where the fashionable Castellani fi rm placed its imitation 

versions of ancient jewelry beside authentic Italian peasant jewelry. Peasant jewelry 

was also praised in the 1867 Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue. Meanwhile, curators at the 

South Kensington Museum had collected Indian jewelry in gold and silver in 1851, items 

in cheaper materials in 1867, and peasant jewelry in 1870.25 

From 1871 to 1874, small-scale international exhibitions held at South Kensington 

featured different objects every year. In 1872 it was jewelry, twenty-fi ve percent of which 

was peasant jewelry from Sweden, Greece, Norway, Armenia, and Albania.26 In exchange 

FIGURE 5. John Atkinson Grimshaw, Day Dreams, 1877. Oil on board, 37 × 67 cm. 

Private collection / Photo © Bonhams, London, UK /Bridgeman Art Library.

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126 Palaces of Art

columns of the Queen, peasant jewelry was often 

the subject of the “ornaments” section.27 Cheap 

fi ligree from Italy and Malta (like the necklace in 

Bocca Baciata and Fair Rosamund, 1861) became 

popular in the 1870s. The simplicity and presumed authenticity of peasant jewelry appealed 

to followers of the Arts and Crafts movement, 

whose taste for ruby paste, common cornelian, 

and agate, cheap underrated things, also distinguished Rossetti’s jewelry from that of his Aesthete contemporaries. In Edward Poynter’s 1881 

painting Helen (Figure 6), for instance, the fi gure 

wears a necklace designed by Poynter from an 

Indian Gujarati peasant necklace; Poynter’s version inspired a variation of this necklace by Carlo 

Giuliano, a prominent designer for Castellani 

(Figure 7), in a typical dialogue between aestheticism and fashion, evidenced later in Poynter’s 

1887 watercolor version of the painting in which 

Helen wears earrings similar to pieces in Castellani’s collection of Italian peasant jewelry and an 

Italianate classical tiara, both absent from the 

1881 painting.28

The jewelry that Rossetti avoids other 

Aesthetes include: cameos, parure sets, enameling, expensive gems in gold settings, revivalist 

styles, jeweled plants and birds, carved coral, 

diamonds, and tiaras. Rossetti uses brooches, 

not combs or ferronières, as hair ornaments. 

He shares popular taste for heart shapes, 

cheap coral strands, paste, and glass. Monna 

Vanna (Figure 8) exemplifi es Rossetti’s use of 

jewelry.29 His favored spiral pin appears in her 

tresses twice. She clasps a popular coral necklace “orientally” around her throat. She wears 

a South Asian makara bracelet, which matches 

no other jewelry. The strangest item in Rossetti’s oeuvre is also here: the peculiar owl feather 

fan. Peacock or ostrich feather fans implied eroticism, fashion, and elegance and were 

popular in advertisements and in paintings of well-to-do women, odalisques, and classical 

goddesses. But Monna Vanna’s fan was so unusual that F. G. Stephens called the work 

“The Lady with the Fan.”30

The Rhetoric of Dress

Domestic handbooks encouraged women to use drapery fabrics for dresses, but 

Monna Vanna’s damask is just drapery, not a dress at all. Wrapping his fi gure in upholFIGURE 6. Sir Edward John Poynter, Helen, 1881. Oil on canvas, 

91.7 × 71.5 cm. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Purchased 1968.

FIGURE 7. Carlo Giuliano, necklace, ca. 1881. © Victoria and 

Albert Museum, London.

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Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac 127

stery material, Rossetti thus takes the advice of handbooks to an extreme, perhaps even 

to parody. A similar use of extremes is present in the proliferation of trimmings. Dress 

protocol allowed for a profusion of buttons, bow, ruffl es, braids, and shawls. Monna 

Vanna’s dress is trimmed with two sets of bows—one along the neckline and a second 

strand of green satin bows; the fan and her hair are both trimmed in spiral pins. By the 

1870s, trimming, though middle class, had become so complicated that it was considered 

the opposite of good taste. Charles Eastlake denounced fringe in his 1868 Hints on Household Taste. As Elaine Freedgood observes, “Trim becomes a kind of sartorial aggression in 

which a dress ... is nearly impossible to reduce to its component parts.”31

Feldman argues that for Aesthetes, “to decorate or ornament is intrinsically to challenge the notion of unifi ed, mastering form,” whether narratives of classifi cation, historical chronology, fashion, or social hierarchy.32 Just as Rossetti’s factotums relished listing 

FIGURE 8. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Monna Vanna, 1866. Oil on canvas, 88.9 × 86.4 cm. Tate Britain, London.

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128 Palaces of Art

his strange furnishings, he relished including many diverse objects in his pictures and in 

trimming and layering, or cladding, his fi gures, a practice that signifi ed luxury since the 

eighteenth century. If, as Freedgood suggests, fringe or excess trim was the opposite of 

good taste, then Rossetti surely deploys his secondhand things (and secondhand women) 

to allude playfully to excesses in ordinary dress, homes, shops, and ads by rhetorically 

but ambivalently imitating and critiquing such excesses while acknowledging their luxuriating appeal, further enhanced in his virtual rendition.

Medley as Meaning

The less objects are related to narrative, history, or each other, the less sure we 

are of their meanings in the “thickened visual world” of Rossetti’s paintings, with their 

multiple, decommodifi ed, ambiguous, and indecipherable things from different histories, places, and economic value.33 Rossetti’s art recalls seventeenth-century cabinets of 

curiosities, whose objects were united by the collector’s taste, memories, and desires for 

strangeness or rarity.34 Victorian classifi cation systems, in contrast, fi xed the meanings 

of objects and made them “rational” commodities. By 1850 the cabinet was considered 

“too passionate, too subject to the article collected, too feminine to measure up to the 

discipline and rigour of ... the museum.”35

Like cabinets of curiosities, Rossetti’s paintings thwart objective classifi cation and 

empty things of commonplace or consensual meanings. These virtual objects escape taxonomy, social propriety, and commodifi cation and become fetishes—a word used here in 

its Victorian ethnographic meaning applied to colonized cultures’ objects with a magic or 

power outside social systems.36 Fetishism, in which objects dominate people or are outside 

the social order, is the opposite of the ensemble and the classifi cation system, which are 

homogenizing and conformist forces. The unclassifi able fetish exists in “a border zone” 

beyond the routine stability of meaning in everyday life; as Peter Pels has observed, it is 

“animated, able to dominate persons,” tied to global trade, yet outside everyday use or 

market exchange.37

“As ‘wonder’ became subordinate” to Enlightenment taxonomy, it became, says Pels, 

“domesticated as kitsch, ‘fancy,’ or ‘bric-a-brac,’ objects collected—at home by women 

and children—without order or use,” the irrational fetish, the marginal collector.38 “Brica-brac” was Rossetti’s word for his objects.39 However denigrated, such objects offer a 

critique of taxonomic systems and suggest ambiguities that subvert a culture’s or nation’s 

claims of historical lineage and origins. In an endless circulation of goods, whether in markets or museums, things lose and gain meanings continuously. Major H. Byng Hall, in his 

1868 book on bric-a-brac, explains the term’s embrace of diverse things that turned both 

aristocrats and the “lower orders” into mere resellers of everything from antiques to 

trivia, “all that is precious and beautiful as well as mediocre in art,” without consideration 

of qualitative distinctions.40 The term links aesthetics and commerce because value could 

be determined by anyone, even ignorant or greedy consumers, for objects in endless 

circulation, sold and resold, in a process that erases origins, histories, and meanings while 

allowing new feelings and meanings to accrue to objects. Bric-a-brac exemplifi ed the 

ephemeral nature of an object’s meanings and signifi cance, a theme that dominates Rossetti’s poetry and appears in his paintings through displays of wildly disparate, deraciné 

things.41

Rossetti’s secondhand jewelry, clothing, and women are fetishized by their surface 

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Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac 129

sparkle and unclassifi ability, which liberate them from preconceived meanings and presumed 

contexts. Their allure is their impenetrability, which makes them “outré” (William Michael 

Rossetti’s word for the early Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic), rather than fashionable, valuable, or 

rich in historical or national associations.42 Rossetti does not impose symbolic or didactic 

meanings upon his things, but leaves them strange and autonomous to offer his clients the 

chance to project their desires onto profuse riches of virtual things and women outside the 

social order. 

Rossetti never restored or revived these objects’ histories, but left them as fetishes—

isolated, distinct, and disconnected from each other. His mélange of objects, his “rage for 

strangeness,” in Ford Madox Brown’s words, created what Stephens termed “barbaric 

jewellery” in Stephens’s 1896 description of the “modern,” “Venetian,” and “sumptuous” 

Beloved.

43 This painting’s “special system of symbols and a unique vocabulary for artistic expression,” as Waugh described it, befi t what Graham Robertson called Rossetti’s “sweeping 

away [of] preconceived ideals.”44 Rossetti staged “aestheticism as a response to burgeoning 

cultural artifacts,” removed from religion, morality, history, fashion, or iconography. He contributed to art’s autonomy by decontextualizing objects to negotiate new relations between 

art and spectators for whom such uncanny objects defamiliarized the goods advertised, 

“disseminated, displayed, and consumed” in Victorian England, as well as their settings of 

home or city.45 Rossetti rejected the syntax of ensembles to empty things of their social and 

historical meanings to make them anew while fl irting dangerously with bad taste and thus 

problematizing taste itself. 

Rossetti’s Victorian biographer H. C. Marillier observed in 1899 that 

bric-à-brac was not of much account in England when Rossetti 

fi rst began rummaging the dealers’ shops. ... [It was] a purely 

original idea in those days to buy up old furniture for use, 

and to enrich the walls of a house with panelled carvings and 

treasures from Japan. Those who follow the fashion to-day 

do it ... vulgarly and unintelligently, turning their houses into 

museums of costly and incongruous objects. ... Rossetti knew 

to a hairbreadth what would harmonize and what would not. ... 

He was never guilty of errors of taste. ... His judgment was a 

touchstone.46

Rossetti’s modernist biographer Evelyn Waugh, however, condemned him as “errant and 

erring ... guided entirely by his own momentary preferences” for “extraneous objects ... 

without reference to their relevance to the subject or value in the composition,” resulting in a “medley of bric-a-brac.”47 Synthesizing these biographers’ views, Feldman argues 

that Rossetti combines Victorian taste for bric-a-brac with modernism. His representations of bric-a-brac, far from being “errant,” refute fi xed identities and fashionable order 

in “a confusion of categories” that Feldman argues, “hung together” nonetheless, but 

usually outside of any context, “collected from other places, times, and cultures.”48

An Abundance of Strange Beauty

Rossetti’s strange and estranged things perform an imaginary aesthetic revisionism 

of cultural meanings, like the fi ctional collections of Dorian Gray or Jean Des Esseintes, 

“counter canons” of inorganic, hybrid, unhomogenized, transhistorical objects of unknown origins.49 Certainly by Victorian standards, Rossetti’s virtual things are “exotic” as 

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130 Palaces of Art

that term is recently redefi ned in studies of the late nineteenth-century French colonial 

ethnographer Victor Segalen. Writing between 1904 and 1918, Segalen rejects links between the exotic and the foreign or colonial; claiming that the exotic is anything unusual 

or outside acceptable norms, he argues for an appreciation of difference, rather than 

its assimilation or romanticization.50 Although Rossetti seems at times to romanticize 

difference, he also generates and invents difference as exotic in Segalen’s sense: exoticism 

lies in the things themselves, not in their associations with imperial or domestic spheres. 

His random combinations from diverse cultures may allude to the imperial project, but it 

is a reference as discontinuous, free-fl oating, and disjointed as his paintings’ historical or 

literary allusions or his frequent changes of his paintings’ titles and fi gures’ names.

Rossetti’s things, however, exist between aestheticism and commerciality. As Jonathan Freedman argues, Aestheticism’s gospel of art’s autonomy, meant to liberate art 

from commerce, instead assimilated art to consumerism; “the experience of art as an 

end in itself” ironically made art a consumable object to satisfy spectators’ desires and 

appropriations, a seeming contradiction.51 Rossetti’s things draw on and critique both 

aesthetic and commercial exchange values, using the power of the virtual to suggest new 

values by inducing disorientation, fantasy, and fetishism.

Such paintings represent artists’ accrual of cultural capital, giving them the authority to 

determine aesthetic values for goods through the virtual transformation of things, making 

imaginary objects stranger or more beautiful than prototypes in shops or museums. In 

these “thick” paintings, things deny their usual functions as markers of taste, status, or class. 

Rossetti’s simultaneously ancient and modern women dressed in disensembles suggest a 

critique of objects across all commercial and cultural venues in Victorian visuality, while 

simultaneously recognizing and indulging in the sensuality of abundance. Rossetti suggests 

a proximity between painting and shops that resembles the Victorian relationship between 

advertisements and serialized novel chapters juxtaposed in magazines; intentionally or not, 

their placement eventually intertwined until ads cross-referenced novels and novels parodied 

advertising language.52

Literary scholars have described how Rossetti’s poetry problematizes the proximity of 

art and commerce and alludes to art’s juxtaposition to other venues, from museums to ads 

to pornography.53 Rossetti’s museum poems, as John Barclay observes, highlight confl icts 

between objects and the museums or shops that impose new meanings on uprooted things, 

replacing interpretation with reception. In a stanza later removed from the poem “The 

Burden of Nineveh,” about an Assyrian object brought into the British Museum, Rossetti 

writes,

Here, while the Antique-students lunch,

Shall Art be slang’d o’er cheese and hunch,

Whether the great R.A.’s a bunch

Of gods or dogs, and whether Punch

Is right about the P.R.B.

Beyond the artist’s control, art is rewritten or reinscribed (“slang’d”) in market, museum, refectory, pub, and Punch, institutions indistinguishable from one another here. 

The object, alienated from its time and geography by the museum, is then reproduced, 

disseminated, and displayed as a fragment with “an aesthetic or sensational rather than a 

hermeneutic value.”54 Rossetti’s paintings similarly display objects that are outside historical, social, and fashion systems. 

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Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac 131

In a Victorian world of spectacles, excess trimming, and hyper-ornamentation, painting 

had to hold its own. Rossetti made cheap jewelry gorgeous and his lovers into goddesses—

all through a kind of anti-iconography of decommodifi ed and fetishized glittery surfaces and 

textures of unclassifi able and impenetrable curiosities and women. Rossetti’s defi ance of 

ensembles had consequences for his representation of women. Kristin Lysack suggests that 

“the discourses of middle-class women’s consumption made visible the porous boundary” 

between high and low culture, expanding “traffi c freely between them.”55 Rossetti’s virtual 

women are not simply ornamental females in domestic spaces. Looming large in the center 

of these paintings, these fi gures appear to consume goods, lend them a magic aura, and 

then (re)produce them in new confi gurations, just as Rossetti was doing with his images. 

These females assert an agency described in recent studies (including the essay by Susan 

Casteras in this volume) that reassess both Victorian interior decoration and consumption 

as gendered activities marked by production, agency, creativity, and imagination. Undomestic, undomesticated, and overscaled, they are not simply signifi ers of consumption, commodity exchanges, excess decoration, and restricted social and economic control. Instead, 

they are imbued with a physical power that underscores their aesthetic authority displayed 

in their highly individual collections of things that lie outside the Victorian canon of goods 

and taste, an aesthetic of originality later advocated by several Victorian women writers on 

decoration.56

Like Whistler, Rossetti depicted objects that he collected, but he kept them strategically distant from high-end goods. He anticipated Mary Eliza Haweis’s appreciation of 

Indian jewelry and advice in her popular Art of Beauty (1878) not to follow the “mistaken 

craze” for parure but to express originality and personal taste because “change, variety, 

freshness” are the essences of all “true beauty” in dress.57 In his disensembles, Rossetti 

suggests new aesthetic relations that were antagonistic to the commercial and cultural 

venues with which painting increasingly competed after the 1851 Great Exhibition. He 

combined Aestheticism’s heightened austerity with excessive bric-a-brac that diverged 

from elite tastes, perhaps in a quixotic attempt to assert his aesthetic authority in a 

world in which artists no longer guided public taste as multiple aesthetic values brought 

commerce and art into a confl icted yet modern relationship. 

Notes

 1. See Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and 

Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990).

 2. Julie Codell, “Exotic, Fetish, Virtual: Visual Excesses in Victorian Painting,” in The 

Uses of Excess in Visual and Material Culture, 1600–2010, ed. Julia Skelly (Aldershot, 

UK: Ashgate, forthcoming).

 3. Aileen Ribeiro, “Fashion and Whistler,” in Whistler, Women, and Fashion (New York: 

Frick Collection in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 16–51. 

 4. Ian Jenkins, “Frederick Lord Leighton and Greek Vases,” The Burlington Magazine: 

A Centenary Anthology, ed. Michael Levey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003): 

150–59.

 5. See Paul Levinson, review of The Virtual Society, by Harvey Wheeler, Journal of Social 

and Biological Structures, 14, no. 3 (1991): 363–66.

 6. Henry Treffry Dunn, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle; or, Cheyne 

Walk Life, ed. Gale Pedrick (London: Elkins Matthews, 1904), 51, 35, 18.

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132 Palaces of Art

 7. T. Hall Caine, Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883), 

228–29. See also Theodore Watts-Dunton, “The Truth about Rossetti,” Nineteenth 

Century 13 (1883): 404–23. 

 8. The Valuable Contents of the Residence of Dante G. Rossetti (London: T. G. Wharton, 

Martin and Co., Auctioneers, 1882), catalogue no. 104. 

 9. Jessica R. Feldman, “Modernism’s Victorian Bric-à-Brac,” Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 

3 (September 2001): 461–62.

 10. Dunn, Recollections of Rossetti, 27.

 11. Feldman, “Modernism’s Victorian Bric-à-Brac,” 461.

 12. See Elizabeth Helsinger, “Aesthetic and Social Experiment in the 1860s,” Ideas 5, no. 

2 (1998), http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/ideasv52/helsing.htm. Accessed May 2, 

2013.

 13. Feldman, “Modernism’s Victorian Bric-à-Brac,” 462.

 14. Rossetti to George Rae, August 21, 1869, in The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel 

Rossetti, ed. William Fredeman, vol. 4, part 2 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 241.

 15. Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A Cultural History of Gem Stones and Jewellery (London: 

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2009), 333.

 16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), 43.

 17. Shirley Bury, “Rossetti and His Jewellery,” Burlington Magazine 118, no. 875 (1976): 

101. 

 18. Bury, “Rossetti and His Jewellery,” 97; Shirley Bury, Jewellery, 1789–1910: The International Era (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1991), 2:476–77.

 19. Rossetti to Henry Treffry Dunn, March 1873, in Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. 

Oswald Doughty and J. R. Wahl (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965–67), 3:1149. See also 

Bury, “Rossetti and His Jewellery,” 101; Bury, Jewellery, 2:470. 

 20. Bury, “Rossetti and His Jewellery,” 101. The pendant of a pierced heart appears in 

Monna Pomona, 1864, and Regina Cordium, 1866. Bury considers it an eighteenth-century Spanish work (p. 102). A similar piece is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

 21. Tate Britain describes the headpiece as Peruvian leatherwork; the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, identifi es it as “Chinese feather-work.” Thanks to Emily Umberger 

and Marie Timberlake for sharing their expertise on Peruvian dress. The bracelet 

also appears in Monna Vanna. 

 22. W. M. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (London: Cassell, 1889), 

51.

 23. Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria (London: British 

Museum, 2010), 129. 

 24. A. de Barrera, Gems and Jewels (London: Bentley, 1860), 3.

 25. See Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Victoria, 270. 

 26. Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Victoria, 276–77; see Science and Art Department, South Kensington Museum, Catalogue of the Loan Exhibition of Ancient and 

Modern Jewellery and Personal Ornaments, 1872 (London: John Strangeways, 1873). The 

South Kensington museum bought 1,100 pieces of Indian peasant jewelry from the 

Rivett-Carnac Collection (Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Victoria, 296).

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Displaying Aestheticism’s Bric-a-Brac 133

 27. Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Victoria, 319–23.

 28. Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Victoria, 302–3. Gere and Rudoe, although 

recognizing differences between Poynter’s and Giuliano’s necklaces, describe 

Giuliano’s as made for Poynter’s fi gure, but the Victoria and Albert website entry 

states that Poynter’s 1881 oil painting inspired Giuliano’s ca.1881 necklace. See http://

collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O153360/necklace-and-case-carlo-giuliano/. Accessed May 

2, 2013.

 29. Rossetti called Monna Vanna “my best picture hitherto” in a letter to his mother 

Frances Rossetti, dated August 24, 1866, in Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, 

Part Two, ed. W. M. Rossetti (London: Ellis and Elvey, 1895), 188. 

30. F. G. Stephens, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: Seeley, 1894), 70. I wish to thank 

Alison Smith and Emma Jennison for letting me view this painting in storage.

 31. See Clive Edwards, “Structure, Cladding and Detail,” in Fashion, Interior Design, and 

the Contours of Modern Identity, ed. A. Myzelev and J. Potvin (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 

2010), 68, 77–78; Phillis Cunnington, Costume in Pictures (London: Studio Vista, 1964), 

149; Elaine Freedgood, “Fringe,” Victorian Literature and Culture 30, no. 1 (2002): 258.

 32. Feldman, “Modernism’s Victorian Bric-à-Brac,” 459.

 33. Jerome McGann, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost (New Haven, 

CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 94–95. 

 34. The classic text on this topic is Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, 

the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 

153. The cabinet served to perform the magical, exotic, and theatrical, and things 

were arranged according to memory; see Peter Pels, “The Spirit of Matter,” in Border 

Fetishisms, ed. Patricia Spyer (London: Routledge, 1998), 105. 

 35. Pels, “The Spirit of Matter,” 111. 

 36. John Windsor, “Identity Parades,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. J. Elsner and R. 

Cardinal (London: Reaktion, 1994), 50.

 37. Pels, “The Spirit of Matter,” 112, 91–99, 113. 

 38. Pels, “The Spirit of Matter,” 111.

 39. Rossetti comments on his “mania for buying bricabrac” in W. M. Rossetti, Rossetti as 

Designer and Writer, 69. 

 40. Herbert Byng Hall, The Adventures of a Bric-a-Brac Hunter (London: Tinsley Brothers, 

1868), 3–4.

 41. John Barclay, “Consuming Artifacts,” Victorian Poetry 35, no. 1 (1997): 2.

 42. W. M. Rossetti, Fine Art, Chiefl y Contemporary (London: Macmillan, 1867), 187.

 43. Ford Madox Brown, diary entry for September 5, 1854, cited in W. M. Rossetti, 

Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism (London: George Allen, 1899), 19; Stephens, Rossetti, 

61–62. An earlier version of Beloved had a black girl, which Rossetti changed to a 

black boy.

 44. Evelyn Waugh, Rossetti: His Life and Works (London: Methuen, 1991), 52–53; Graham 

Robertson, Time Was (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1931), 86.

 45. Barclay, “Consuming Artifacts,” 2–3.

 46. H. C. Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London: George Bell and Sons, 1899), 121–22. 

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134 Palaces of Art

 47. Waugh, Rossetti, 129–30, 133.

 48. Feldman, “Modernism’s Victorian Bric-à-Brac,” 457, 459, 461.

 49. Matthew Potolsky, “Decadence, Nationalism, and the Logic of Canon Formation,” 

Modern Language Quarterly 67, no. 2 (June 2006): 224.

 50. Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism, trans. and ed. Yaël Rachel Schlick (Durham, NC: 

Duke University Press, 2002); Charles Forsdick, Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of 

Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Marie-Paule Ha, Figuring the East

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).

 51. Freedman, Professions of Taste, 59; Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 27; Paul Fortunato, “Wildean Philosophy with a Needle and Thread,” College Literature 34, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 37–53. 

 52. Emily Steinlight, “‘Anti-Bleak House’: Advertising and the Victorian Novel,” Narrative

14, no. 2 (2006): 132–62.

 53. Martin Danahay, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Virtual Bodies,” Victorian Poetry 36, no. 4 

(1998): 381. 

 54. Barclay, “Consuming Artifacts,” 11. This stanza was published in the Crayon 5 (April 

1858): 95.

 55. Kristin Lysack, Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 13; Erika Rappaport, 

Shopping for Pleasure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). On interior 

decoration with a focus on M. E. Haweis, see Mark Turner, “Furniture Is a Kind of 

Dress: Interiors as Projection of Self,” in Contested Terrains: Proceedings from the 23rd 

Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, ed. Terrance McMinn, John 

Stephens, and Steve Basson (Fremantle, Western Australia: Society of Architectural 

Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 2006), 530–35. 

 56. These women were Agnes and Rhoda Garrett, Mary Eliza Haweis, and Jane Ellen 

Panton. See Judith A. Neiswander, The Cosmopolitan Interior: Liberalism and the British 

Home 1870–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). A year after Rossetti’s death, Liberty’s Department Store opened up its Eastern Jewellery Department. See Clare Phillips, “Jewellery,” in The Cult of Beauty, ed. S. Calloway and Lynn 

Federle Orr (London: V&A Publishing, 2011), 208–11.

 57. On Indian jewelry’s “spontaneous variety,” see M. E. Haweis, The Art of Dress (London: Chatto and Windus, 1879), 97; on parures, see Haweis, The Art of Beauty (New 

York: Harper and Brothers, 1878), 107.

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Aestheticism Meets Arts and 

Crafts: Decorative Art on Display

Imogen Hart

Until recently, Aestheticism and Arts 

and Crafts were held to have very 

different origins and largely incompatible motivations. We might argue that the 

contrasting politics of the two movements 

were played out in their display strategies. 

Aesthetic exhibitions, with their emphasis on 

creating a harmonious environment for the 

viewer, reinforced the movement’s preoccupation with consumption, whereas the democratic policies of Arts and Crafts exhibitions 

represented that movement’s concern with 

production.1

Lately, however, new scholarship on the 

period has challenged the prevailing view 

that Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts were 

directly opposed to one another and has even 

questioned the helpfulness of calling either a 

movement with a coherent agenda.2 Although 

there were, of course, many differences 

between Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts exhibitions, they also shared much in common. 

They were, in large part, motivated by the 

infl exibility and exclusivity of the Royal Academy.3

 Their critics often responded as much 

to the conditions of display as to the individual 

objects. And they experimented with the ideal of the ensemble as an organizing principle.

The exhibition policies associated with Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism represented innovative approaches to decorative arts in particular. While they may have done 

so from different directions and with different goals, both movements participated in 

unifying fi ne and decorative art: Aesthetic exhibitions displayed paintings surrounded 

by carefully selected decorative art, arguably domesticating fi ne art (Figure 1), whereas 

Arts and Crafts exhibitions elevated decorative arts to a position in which they could 

be judged on the same terms as fi ne arts. I suggest that when both movements took on 

the question of the relationship between fi ne and decorative art, the question of display 

FIGURE 1. “The Grosvenor Gallery of Fine Art, New Bond Street,” 

Illustrated London News, 1877. Mary Evans Picture Library.

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136 Palaces of Art

arose as one of the fundamental issues to be dealt with, and the crucial problem surrounded the tension between the low status of domestic art and the desire to incorporate art into everyday life. Both movements addressed this issue by exhibiting decorative 

art in ways that associated it both with the high status of fi ne art and with the practicality 

of domestic space.

James McNeill Whistler famously revolutionized exhibition practices, most notably 

through his own one-man shows and displays at the Society of British Artists.4 Particularly important were his reduction of the number of exhibits and his reconstitution of 

the exhibition space along the lines of a domestic interior. By trimming down exhibitions 

to a mere two rows of relatively generously spaced objects, Whistler communicated the 

assumption that individual exhibits merited more sustained contemplation than those 

squeezed into the fl oor-to-ceiling display policy modeled on the Royal Academy exhibitions. Signifi cantly, this new approach was presented in an environment that was clearly 

codifi ed as domestic space, as contemporaries recognized, one critic observing, for 

example, that “the arrangement of the room will be a lesson to aesthetic visitors in the 

now favorite amusement of domestic decoration.”5 Surrounding paintings with carefully 

curated textiles, porcelain, and tinted walls, Whistler implicitly suggested that domestic 

interiors could be the most promising site for a sophisticated engagement with art.

Shortly after Whistler’s groundbreaking experiments at the Society of British 

Artists, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society was founded in protest against the Royal 

Academy’s restriction to the fi ne arts. It was the society’s goal to provide a chance for 

decorative artists to appeal to “the public eye ... upon strictly artistic grounds in the 

same sense as the pictorial artist.”6 It was the status the society sought for such objects 

that made their exhibitions radical. 

When it was fi rst established, the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society struggled to 

be taken seriously in the art world. According 

to designer Charles Robert Ashbee, a Royal 

Academician responded to Ashbee’s claim 

that the Arts and Crafts exhibitions should be 

held at the Royal Academy with the retort, 

“My dear young man, you surely don’t expect 

us artists to allow our galleries to be turned 

into a furniture shop?”7 A furniture shop was 

precisely what the society needed to distinguish 

itself from. It thus modeled itself on fi ne-art 

exhibitions.

Instead of combining objects into roomlike arrangements, which was a common display 

strategy in commercial spaces, the Arts and 

Crafts exhibitions put objects on walls and in 

cabinets (Figure 2). But the society’s display 

strategy shifted over time, moving away from 

a museum-style display toward the ensemble. 

As art historian Morna O’Neill has shown, this 

change was motivated partly by the society’s 

reception at the Turin exhibition of 1902, 

where its display contrasted sharply with those 

FIGURE 2. Arts and Crafts Exhibition, New Gallery, Regent 

Street, London, 1890. English Heritage.

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Aestheticism Meets Arts and Crafts 137

of other countries, which were organized into sample room ensembles.8 O’Neill cites 

a critic who observed that the society’s display at the Turin exhibition would have been 

better “had the works been treated less like pictures and related more to daily use and 

environment.”9 Meanwhile, both Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts display strategies extended into spaces that blurred the domestic and the public, such as Leighton House.10

Between them, Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts exhibitions paved the way for a new 

type of engagement with decorative art. It was, they argued, as worthy of contemplation 

as paintings, and that contemplation could as easily—perhaps even more effectively—

take place in domestic settings as in public galleries. But what might that new engagement 

with decorative art look like? 

How do we take it seriously as the focus of contemplation while letting it remain 

compatible with the distractions and practicalities of everyday life? In 2002, the theorist 

of everyday life Ben Highmore asked, “Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible, 

unnoticed, part of the furniture. ... How then do we strip the everyday of its inconspicuousness? By what means do we resuscitate something that fails to interest us?”11 These 

were questions that also preoccupied the protagonists of the Aesthetic and Arts and 

Crafts movements. One place to look for answers is in the work of William Morris. As I 

will show in the remainder of this essay, Morris demonstrated how decorative art could 

be both intellectually ambitious and suited to everyday life.

According to Morris, a pattern should require a certain degree of concentration 

from the viewer, but not too much. It should be visually complex enough to “lull” the 

viewer’s “curiosity to trace it out” but should not offer endless complexity.12 Although 

“there should be a certain mystery” and “we 

should not be able to read the whole thing at 

once,” “the obvious presence of a geometric 

order” should limit this mystery and prevent 

“our feeling restless over a pattern.”13 Poppy

(Figure 3) represents this balance. Like many 

of Morris’s designs, Poppy is dominated by a 

powerful scroll format. We may think we can 

identify an S shape due to the thick, obtrusive 

stem that describes powerful curves, but our 

eye is reading as an S what is, in fact, a more 

complex and continuous pattern. The stem 

disappears into a blossom and then emerges 

again only to disappear once more into a 

second blossom, close to which a second stem 

curves back upward to turn the S into a fi gure 

eight, which is completed via a poppy, from 

which the initial stem emerges and begins the S 

shape once more. As we follow the stem, there 

are frequent invitations to leave the path of the 

S or 8 and explore the journeys of the shoots, 

petals, and leaves, which often interweave and 

overlap one another. Because there is more 

than one way of tracing the pattern, Poppy can 

sustain our interest for an extended time, yet 

FIGURE 3. Poppy wallpaper (also known as Pink and Poppy). Designed by William Morris, 1880, and printed by Jeffrey & Co. for 

Morris & Co. Block printed in silver paint and lacquer. © Victoria 

and Albert Museum, London.

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138 Palaces of Art

our eye will eventually become aware that in each direction the same motif is repeated, 

reducing the sense of “mystery.” Poppy thus conforms to Morris’s rule that “we should 

not be able to read the whole thing at once,” while also possessing an underlying “order” 

that prevents the viewer from feeling “restless.” Morris’s patterns offer a balance between “mystery” and “restlessness” that becomes apparent when they are contemplated 

over a period of time. We might characterize the sense of progress conveyed during an 

encounter with Poppy as something akin to narrative, and indeed, Morris speaks of a 

pattern’s “mystery,” of the viewer’s “curiosity,” and of our ability to “read” it.

One might protest that it makes little sense to talk of narrative in decorative art, 

which rarely represents the human fi gure. Some examples, perhaps, lend themselves 

more easily to this kind of interpretation than others. Patterns such as Bird and Peacock and Dragon, for example, include creatures whose interactions constitute a kind of 

dialogue. In the former, birds look over their shoulders at one another or hover close 

together with overlapping wings, whereas in the latter, dragons and peacocks are locked 

in confrontation. Yet narrative can be identifi ed even in those patterns that do not 

represent animal life; as Caroline Arscott has argued, we should not “see the ornamental features of Morris’s designs as precluding narrative.”14 I suggest that Morris’s designs 

share at least two characteristics with narrative: fi rst, they communicate meaning, and 

second, they convey that meaning over time. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to identify these characteristics not in the patterns themselves, but in the viewer’s engagement 

with them. 

In Morris’s patterns, narrative can be communicated compositionally or symbolically, 

and in both cases nature is fundamental. Morris points to composition as the source 

of meaning when he declares that “rational 

growth is necessary to all patterns, or at 

least the hint of such growth; and in recurring 

patterns, at least, the noblest are those where 

one thing grows visibly and necessarily from 

another.”15 In Vine (Figure 4), we see an example 

of this “rational growth.” If we look closely at 

the willow pattern in the background, we begin 

to see how “one thing grows visibly and necessarily from another.” A main willow stem leads 

vertically upward, from which additional stems 

periodically emerge, and these in turn sprout 

new growth, sometimes splitting and sometimes producing smaller offshoots. Twisting under, over, and through itself and the vine motif, 

the willow leads our eye on a journey. Like a 

maze, it sometimes leads into a dead end, when 

a stem tails off into a cluster of leaves, but we 

can backtrack and follow another stem in a 

different direction. In this example, the composition works together with the subject matter 

to convey a sense of narrative. 

For Morris believes that nature also introduces narrative symbolically. He declares that 

FIGURE 4. Vine wallpaper. Designed by William Morris, ca. 1873, 

and printed by Jeffrey & Co. from 1874. Block printed in distemper colors. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Aestheticism Meets Arts and Crafts 139

he “must still insist on plenty of meaning in your 

patterns ... must have unmistakable suggestions 

of gardens and fi elds, and strange trees, boughs, 

and tendrils.” He claims that “what we want 

to clothe our walls with is ... something which 

reminds us of life beyond itself, and which has 

the impress of human imagination strong on 

it.”16 This implies that decoration works together with the viewer’s imagination to create 

meaning, so that the meaning comes into being 

whenever the decoration is observed and can 

be different for each observer. Narrative is thus 

generated by an interplay between the viewer’s 

mind and that of the maker. 

The collective effect of objects experienced in an ensemble can also be interpreted as 

a kind of narrative in which meaning is generated through juxtaposition. Such collections 

of objects work together in a way we might 

describe as “organic” since each part is subordinate to a whole from which it derives greater 

signifi cance. In Pimpernel (Figure 5), leaves and 

stems weave their way over and under one 

another throughout the pattern. The impression given by these interactions is of an ongoing 

conversation and an environment in which different plants coexist harmoniously. There is no 

fi nal resolution to be drawn from this pattern, in 

which the dialogue taking place between the different forms is continuous, like the relationship 

between the interwoven threads of a tapestry. 

The Pimpernel wallpaper decorated the dining 

room at Morris’s London home, Kelmscott 

House, and we fi nd further examples of dialogue 

if we look beyond the pattern to its surroundings. The large poppy blossoms resonate with 

the similarly sized fl owers depicted in the Persian carpet that stretches from fl oor to ceiling 

on the left-hand wall (Figure 6). These blossoms 

also echo the shape and size of the plates arranged on shelves along the adjoining wall, which 

can be seen to the right in the photograph. The 

Pimpernel wallpaper thus provides a link between 

two walls that seem to be designed according to 

entirely different principles—one representing 

classical symmetry, proportion, and discipline 

and the other a larger-than-life collection of 

FIGURE 5. Pimpernel wallpaper. Designed by William Morris, 

1876, and printed by Jeffrey & Co. for Morris & Co. Block 

printed in distemper colors. © Victoria and Albert Museum, 

London.

FIGURE 6. Emery Walker, photograph of the dining room, Kelmscott House, ca. 1896. William Morris Gallery, London Borough 

of Waltham Forest.

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140 Palaces of Art

juxtaposed ornament.17 Pursuing the idea that Morris’s ensembles generate “dialogue” 

and “narrative,” we might see the Pimpernel wallpaper as a mediator in this particular 

case, helping to establish harmony. 

A similar function is performed by the Vine wallpaper in the morning room at 1 Holland Park, the home of the Ionides family, which was decorated by Morris & Co. in the 

1880s (Figure 7). Vine’s bold scrolling formation echoes the emphatic, twisting acanthus 

leaves in The Forest tapestry on the left, thereby providing a sense of unity throughout 

the room. Next to The Forest, a classically inspired mantelpiece introduces a powerful 

verticality that contrasts with the pronounced horizontality of the tapestry. Vine, whose 

scroll format gives it both verticality and horizontality, helps to generate an overall sense 

of balance. Again, the wallpaper is a mediator that blends aspects of the room’s different 

components to create a sense of harmony. 

The organicism that can be found both within and between Morris’s patterns often 

communicates harmony or unity since no element is allowed to dominate. This balance 

may explain why a viewer might continue to be interested in engaging with a pattern, or 

with an ensemble, in everyday life. This is a narrative without a conclusion; instead, it is 

an ongoing dialogue in which exchange and confl ict between the different elements is 

maintained. The sense of balance and harmony has the potential to suspend the viewer’s 

consciousness of time passing and to ground the viewer in the present moment.

One straightforward way in which the viewer may be made aware of presentness is 

demonstrated by Strawberry Thief. Here mischievous birds are frozen in the act of stealing 

fruit, with the result that the viewer may have the sensation of time standing still. Yet the 

processes by which Morris’s designs can keep us in the present are both more sophisFIGURE 7. Morning room, 1 Holland Park, home of the Ionides family, 1902. J. Ionides, photograph National Monuments Record. English Heritage.

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Aestheticism Meets Arts and Crafts 141

ticated and more fl exible than this example suggests. Morris declares, “Now it is one 

of the chief uses of decoration, the chief part of its alliance with nature, that it has to 

sharpen our dulled senses.”18 “Decoration” plays a crucial role in heightening the viewer’s 

awareness of his or her surroundings. 

Morris compares this function of “decoration” to the effects of nature, and a close 

study of his letters helps us to understand why. Morris frequently describes the present 

moment to his correspondents in terms of his perception of nature. Whether in the 

town or the country, at home or at the factory, Morris is acutely aware of his surroundings at all times. From Kelmscott Manor, his country home, he writes, “I’m writing 

among the grey gables and rook haunted trees, with a sense of the place being almost 

too beautiful to work in,” and, on another occasion, “I am sitting now, 10 p.m., in the 

tapestry room, the moon rising red through the east-wind haze, and a cow lowing over 

the fi elds.”19 From Kelmscott House in London, he writes, “I am sitting in my room with 

the leaves dancing about in the sunshine on the table and the water sparkling outside so 

that it looks quite pretty.”20 And from Merton Abbey, the company’s factory, he writes, 

“I fi nd my room here and a view of the winter garden, with the men spreading some 

pieces of chintz on the bleaching ground, somewhat of a consolation.”21 These experiences become extraordinary because nature functions to “sharpen” Morris’s senses. 

Using Morris’s understanding of “nature” as a model, then, we can get a sense of how he 

expects “decoration” to have a comparable effect. 

What characteristics should a piece of decorative art possess if it is to “sharpen 

our dulled senses”? Morris’s “sense of the place being almost too beautiful to work in” 

suggests an answer to this question. Beauty, it seems, is what nature and decoration alike 

can offer to sharpen our senses. Morris describes “the lesser arts” as “that great body of 

art, by means of which men have at all times more or less striven to beautify the familiar 

matters of everyday life.”22 For Morris, the beautifi cation of everyday life and the sharpening of our “dulled senses” are related. 

The beauty of Morris’s ideal decoration not only works to “sharpen our dulled 

senses” but also to sustain our interest. As John Ruskin writes, “For when we are interested by the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told over and 

over again, and stopping always at the same point.”23 Beauty, according to Ruskin, makes 

us want to keep looking and keep coming back to look. Our reward, as we do so, is not a 

new chapter in an exhaustible “story” but is instead the experience of looking itself: “the 

oftener we can see it the better.” For Ruskin, beauty is something to be contemplated 

in the present and for the sake of the present. Similarly, for Morris, when our “dulled 

senses” perceive beauty in the “familiar matters of everyday life,” they are sharpened, 

making us more aware of our present. As Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued, a work of 

art’s “beauty is in the present moment of the observer’s judgement.”24

If we were only interested in the Pimpernel wallpaper for its intriguing interwoven 

pattern, we might soon “get tired” of it and require a new pattern to entertain us. If, 

however, “we are interested by the beauty” of it, “the oftener we can see it the better.” Of course, the question of whether Pimpernel is beautiful is a separate issue altogether, but assuming that we do fi nd it beautiful, our contemplation of its beauty would 

involve retracing its design, an experience we would begin to appreciate less for its 

novelty and more for its aesthetic rewards as time went on. If we consider the Pimpernel wallpaper beautiful, its capacity to “sharpen our dulled senses” need not diminish as 

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142 Palaces of Art

we become more “familiar” with it. 

Although an object may, in our 

contemplation of it, emphasize the 

present, this does not necessarily 

mean that our experience of it will 

always be the same. The potential 

for change in our encounter with an 

object, from one day (or even one 

moment) to the next, allows the 

object to keep “sharpen[ing] our 

dulled senses.” This can be seen if 

we look at Kennet (Figure 8), one of 

the printed textiles Morris named 

after tributaries of the Thames. If 

we imagine Kennet hanging against a 

wall, as it did at Kelmscott Manor, 

the pattern falls in folds before us. 

Parts of the design are visible to 

us, whereas others are invisible or hidden in shadow. If we return again the next day, 

changes may have occurred: the act of opening and closing the door may have caused the 

chintz to fl utter in the draft and settle slightly differently, or brighter sunshine may throw 

darker shadows into the recessed folds. Like the water after which it is named, the surface of Kennet is never the same; it ripples and refl ects the conditions around it. 

Morris advises that “your stuff is pretty sure to be used falling into folds ... so that 

there will be a play of light and shade on it, which will give subordinate incident.”25 These 

terms—“light and shade” and “incident”—are, again, suggestive of narrative. Because the 

environmental factors that endow the pattern with “incident” are uncontrollable, the 

viewer’s experience of the object at a particular moment may never be replicated. That 

specifi c encounter takes place only in the present, and because we know we cannot take 

it for granted, it may “sharpen our dulled senses” into appreciating the moment.

I would like to conclude by suggesting that this connects Morris’s view of the purpose 

of decorative art to Aestheticism. Morris’s description of art “sharpen[ing] our dulled 

senses” echoes Walter Pater’s famous claim that art should make one “burn always” with a 

“hard gem-like fl ame” and give “the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”26 Being in the present is a crucial part of Pater’s aesthetic experience. Thus, when Morris’s patterns aim to “sharpen our dulled senses,” they offer the 

possibility of a Paterian moment. Morris elsewhere describes an experience that sounds 

very much like Pater’s ideal: “Once or twice I had that delightful quickening of perception 

by which everything gets emphasized and brightened, and the commonest landscape looks 

lovely: anxieties and worries, though remembered, yet no weight on one’s spirits—Heaven 

in short.”27A “delightful” sensory presentness is a state of being desired by both Morris and 

Pater.

The implications of Aestheticism for everyday life were, of course, heavily ridiculed 

by satirists such as George Du Maurier in his Punch cartoons, as Susan Casteras notes in 

her essay (see Figures 6, 9, 11, and 14). Aesthetes neglecting their children for the love 

of china or contemplating lilies instead of eating lunch demonstrated the undesirable 

consequences of allowing aesthetic experience to replace the ordinary activities of daily 

FIGURE 8. Kennet furnishing fabric. Designed by William Morris, 1883, and 

manufactured at Merton Abbey. Block-printed and indigo-discharged cotton. 

© Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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Aestheticism Meets Arts and Crafts 143

life.28 According to its critics, Aestheticism invested everyday objects such as teapots 

with a disproportionate signifi cance comprehensible only to an elite group.29 In contrast, Morris’s approach to decorative art is usually understood in a democratic sense, 

in that he expanded the boundaries of “art” to include not only the “familiar matters of 

everyday life” but also a broader audience. Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, in their 

most extreme forms, are thus conventionally opposed to one another, yet the temporal 

implications of Morris’s designs suggest that the two may, in fact, be closely connected. 

As Prettejohn has argued, Aestheticism’s famous Art for Art’s Sake dictum can be 

interpreted as posing the question, “What would art be like if it were not for the sake 

of anything else?”30 Morris’s designs seem to ask what each moment would be like if we 

were to live it not for the sake of anything else, but for its own sake. Similarly, Pater’s 

approach invites us to interpret Art for Art’s Sake as “art for each moment’s sake.” Aestheticism, in its emphasis on the sensory experience of art, makes a case for living in the 

present similar to Morris’s. Both Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts exhibitions, by featuring 

ensembles and evoking domestic space, proposed that art should be part of everyday 

life; Morris’s design philosophy demonstrates some of the implications of those display 

strategies for the design and interpretation of decorative art. 

Notes

Sections from my essay “Time and the Everyday in the Work of William Morris,” 

in William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life, ed. Wendy Parkins (Newcastle upon 

Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), are included in this paper with the 

permission of Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

 1. For a discussion of Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism as associated with production 

and consumption, respectively, see Regenia Gagnier, “Production, Reproduction and 

Pleasure in Victorian Aesthetics and Economics,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. 

Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 130–31.

 2. See Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart, eds., Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010); Imogen Hart, Arts and 

Crafts Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 

 3. On Aesthetic exhibitions and the Royal Academy, see Colleen Denney, At the 

Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877–1890 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University 

Presses, 2000), esp. pp. 44, 50; Deanna Marohn Bendix, Diabolical Designs: Paintings, 

Interiors, and Exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, DC: Smithsonian 

Institution Press, 1995), 209–12; Anne Koval, “The ‘Artists’ Have Come Out and the 

‘British’ Remain: The Whistler Faction at the Society of British Artists,” in After the 

Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Elizabeth Prettejohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 

1999), 93. On Arts and Crafts exhibitions and the Royal Academy, see Hart, Arts and 

Crafts Objects, esp. pp. 150–52.

 4. See Bendix, Diabolical Designs, 205–68; Koval, “The ‘Artists’ Have Come Out,” 

90–111.

 5. Daily Telegraph, 1881, quoted in Bendix, Diabolical Designs, 222.

 6. Walter Crane, “Preface,” in Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society: Catalogue of the First 

Exhibition (London: New Gallery, 1888), 5.

 7. Charles Robert Ashbee, “The English Arts and Crafts Exhibition at the Royal AcadWhistlerBook.indb 143 WhistlerBook.indb 143 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
144 Palaces of Art

emy,” dated December 1916, American Magazine of Art 8 (February 1917): 137.

 8. Morna O’Neill, “Rhetorics of Display: Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau at the Turin 

Exhibition of 1902,” Journal of Design History 20, no. 3 (Autumn 2007): 205–225.

 9. F. Newbery, “The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Art at Turin: The 

English Section,” Studio 44 (1902): 256, quoted in O’Neill, “Rhetorics of Display,” 219.

 10. See Jason Edwards, “The Lessons of Leighton House: Aesthetics, Politics, Erotics,” in 

Rethinking the Interior, 85–110. 

 11. Ben Highmore, “Introduction: Questioning Everyday Life,” in The Everyday Life 

Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002), 21.

 12. William Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing” (1881), in The Collected Works 

of William Morris, with Introductions by His Daughter May Morris (London: Longmans, 

Green, 1910–15), 22:191.

 13. Morris, “Making the Best of It,” in Collected Works, 22:109.

 14. Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven, 

CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 25.

 15. Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” 22:199.

 16. Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” 22:195–96, 179.

 17. See Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects, chap. 2, and “An Enchanted Interior: William Morris at Kelmscott House,” in Rethinking the Interior, 67–84.

 18. Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” in Collected Works, 22:5.

 19. Morris to Louisa Baldwin, February 13, 1872, in The Collected Letters of William 

Morris, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1:155. 

Morris to unknown recipient (possibly Georgiana Burne-Jones), late autumn 1879, in 

Collected Letters, 1:525.

 20. Quoted in May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist (Oxford: Blackwell, 

1936), 619.

 21. Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones, December 28, 1884, in Collected Letters, 1:155.

22. Morris, “The Lesser Arts,” 22:4.

 23. John Ruskin, “On the Present State of Modern Art, with Reference to the Advisable 

Arrangement of a National Gallery,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and 

Alexander Wedderburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19:209.

 24. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 202.

 25. Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern Designing,” 22:193.

 26. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th ed. (London, 1888), 250, 

252.

 27. Morris to Georgiana Burne-Jones (?), September [11?] 1887, in Collected Letters, 

2:687.

 28. See George Du Maurier’s cartoons “Acute Chinamania,” in Punch Almanack, 1875, 

and “An Aesthetic Midday Meal,” in Punch, August 17, 1880.

 29. See Anne Anderson, “‘Fearful Consequences ... of Living up to One’s Teapot’: Men, 

Women and ‘Cultchah’ in the Aesthetic Movement,” in Rethinking the Interior, 111–30.

 30. Prettejohn, Beauty and Art, 152.

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Front MatterWhistlerBook.indb 146 WhistlerBook.indb 146 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Outside the Palace of Art: Global Networks of AestheticismWhistlerBook.indb 147 WhistlerBook.indb 147 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Whistler, Aestheticism, and the 

Networked World

Melody Barnett Deusner

When novelist and friend of the artist Arthur Symons visited James McNeill 

Whistler’s Peacock Room (Figure 1) at the turn of the twentieth century, 

he found an all-encompassing, visually integrated space fully in keeping with 

Alfred Tennyson’s conception of the “palace of art” as a retreat of “god-like isolation”—

or, in Symons’s words, “a room into which nature, sunlight, or any mortal compromise 

could never enter, a wizard’s chapel of art.” This vision of the Aesthetic interior as a 

cloistered, inward-facing cocoon remains very much with us. And yet Symons’s account 

is worth revisiting, as it introduces additional interpretive possibilities, largely through 

the use of language that—although familiar to twenty-fi rst-century readers—seems 

startlingly anachronistic for the period: “Every inch of the wall, ceiling, and wainscoting, 

the doors, the frames of the shutters, was worked into the scheme ... woven together 

into a web or network of almost alarming loveliness.”1

 Symons’s evocative and perceptive 

FIGURE 1. James McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room, 1876–77. Oil paint and gold 

leaf on canvas, leather, and wood, 421.6 × 613.4 × 1026.2 cm (overall). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 

Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.61.

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150 Palaces of Art

visual analysis of this space captures the double 

nature of Whistler’s spreading, crawling, allconsuming peacock feather pattern as something that might not only constrict and entangle but also expand, proliferate, extend its 

reticulations outward. From this perspective, 

the Peacock Room can serve as a starting point 

from which to highlight Aestheticism’s aspects 

of interconnection, organic expansion, and systematic organization—in short, its networked 

character. Placed alongside and shot through 

with the other networked social, technological, 

and economic systems that structured turn-ofthe-century English and American life, Aesthetic paintings and interiors reveal themselves 

to be facilitators of the coordinated manipulation of things and the cooperative relationships between people upon which all of these 

systems depended.

In recent years, the fi eld of Whistler 

studies has taken a strong turn toward the 

“science” of the painter’s practice, underscoring his particularly methodical pursuit of an art 

for art’s sake—or, as Elizabeth Prettejohn has 

usefully reframed the question, “the problem 

of what art might be, if it is not for the sake 

of anything else.”2

 In the case of the Peacock 

Room’s centerpiece, La Princesse du pays de la 

porcelaine (Figure 2), Whistler confl ates, almost 

completely, the practice of arranging objects 

and models into a studio display and that of choosing and placing lines, shapes, and colors 

on canvas to create a painted composition. From the diagonal notes of warm rose that 

playfully skip across robe, fan, and screen to the threads of blue and gray tones that 

weave together carpet, gown, and vase, Whistler gives us a glimpse into life (and art) 

confi gured as a perfectly harmonious system. The painting’s alternate titles (Variations in 

Flesh Colour and Blue and Arrangement in Flesh Colour and Grey) even more explicitly direct 

our attention to the artist’s mandate “to pick, and choose, and group with science” the 

colors and forms of nature “until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony.”3

Although each artist associated with the Aesthetic movement approached the Art 

for Art’s Sake question differently, this emphasis on interlinked and systematic arrangement may be the single factor that unites them all, as it united pictures as diverse as 

Whistler’s Princesse, Albert Moore’s A Venus (1869, York City Art Gallery), and Edward 

Burne-Jones’s The Beguiling of Merlin (Figure 3) within the art collection of Frederick Richards Leyland, the notoriously reluctant patron of the Peacock Room. All three canvases 

demonstrate the artists’ shared conviction that a painting, in the evocative words of the 

nineteenth-century critic Cosmo Monkhouse, is essentially “an organized whole in which 

the beauty of each thing should interweave with the beauty of every other thing, and the 

FIGURE 2. James McNeill Whistler, La Princesse du pays de la 

porcelaine, 1863–65. Oil on canvas, 201.5 × 116.1 cm. Freer 

Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of 

Charles Lang Freer, F1903.91.

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Whistler and the Networked World 151

result should be a harmony of many beauties.”4

As the juxtaposition of these pictures 

makes clear, Aesthetic paintings not only 

construct tightly cohesive systems within the 

boundaries of their frames, but they also have a 

tendency to branch out, to extend themselves 

laterally. In the oeuvres of Whistler, Moore, 

Burne-Jones, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 

the artists’ commitment to purifi ed compositional harmony consistently prioritizes surface 

arrangement over deep perspectival space; 

cropped objects and banded stratifi cation of 

foreground and background create a horizontal 

thrust that extends beyond the edge of the 

canvas but also snaps the pictures back against 

the wall, rendering them fl at, modular—in a 

word, decorative.

Paintings like the Princesse serve as both 

condensed models of coordinated interiors 

and keystones around which fully three-dimensional Aesthetic spaces could be realized—indeed, needed to be realized, as their contents 

had been so carefully interwoven as to risk 

compromise by inharmonious hanging. And 

it was, famously, the lack of fi t that Whistler 

perceived between the subtle variations of the 

Princesse and its installation environment in 

Leyland’s London dining room that prompted 

him to develop the Peacock Room’s blue-andgold color scheme and patterned feather motifs, which rapidly overwrote Thomas Jeckyll’s 

original decorative program for the space—even at the expense of permanently alienating Leyland as a patron and friend.5

As Linda Merrill’s thorough history of the room suggests, despite their disagreements, 

Leyland ultimately did receive what he had wanted in the fi rst place: a completely coordinated social space, one of many he had orchestrated and fi nanced with the profi ts of his 

merchant shipping enterprise. The Peacock Room was different in degree but not necessarily in concept from the William Morris–papered parlors of his Liverpool estate, the 

Burne-Jones–decorated dining room at his Queen’s Gate residence, or the symmetrical 

pairings of Rossetti “heads” he arranged in the Prince’s Gate drawing room (Figure 4). This 

is where Arthur Symons’s use of the words “web” and “network” to describe the Peacock 

Room’s aesthetic interweavings is particularly suggestive because Leyland’s professional life 

was completely devoted to the creation and management of complex networked systems, 

and his personal life—carried out within these harmoniously coordinated walls—bears 

the marks of strategic negotiation that we now commonly refer to as “social networking.” 

The Peacock Room, like other Aesthetic interiors, is an artifact of convergence: a unique 

environment generated by the intersection of an artist’s desires (to carry out an integrated 

FIGURE 3. Edward Burne-Jones, The Beguiling of Merlin, 1872–

77. Oil on canvas, 186 × 111 cm. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port 

Sunlight, Merseyside, UK. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool. 

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152 Palaces of Art

pictorial program in three dimensions) and a patron’s needs (to own a decorated social 

space suitable for public presentation and private fellowship), pursued amid the material 

conditions of late nineteenth-century life, with its increasingly interconnected technological, corporate, and social spheres. These distinct yet related factors collided in the creation 

of the Peacock Room, as Whistler transformed a townhouse dining room into an echo 

chamber of aesthetic relationships that served as a crucible for and conspicuous proof of its 

owner’s system-building aptitudes and international ambitions.6

In his organizational capacity and cooperative tendencies, Leyland was thoroughly 

representative of late nineteenth-century self-made businessmen generally and of Whistler’s English and American patrons more specifi cally. As the owner and manager of the 

Leyland Line, he was enmeshed in an ocean transport system that—much like the railroad 

systems rapidly overspreading the surface of the globe—was so complex in its reticulations 

that Victorian commentators increasingly found themselves reaching for the metaphors of 

fi shing and embroidery nets to capture its scale and scope. Overlaid upon and intersecting 

with these transit systems were equally complex communications technologies—“networks of telephone and telegram,” in Whistler’s words—that linked point to point across 

the Western world.7

 As Walter Crane’s illustrated map of 1886 makes clear, these were 

the essential threads through which empires were knitted together (Figure 5). Close 

FIGURE 4. The Leyland drawing room at 49 Prince’s Gate, London, featuring coordinated paintings by Dante Gabriel 

Rossetti. Photographed by H. Bedford Lemere, National Monuments Record, England. Reproduced by permission of 

English Heritage.

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Whistler and the Networked World 153

analysis of late nineteenth-century English and American discourse indicates that with 

the proliferation of these and other concrete, tangible systems, the network metaphor 

launched into a more broadly conceptual realm, evidence of a world alive to the possibilities of increased interconnection.8

 By 1906 it was reasonable for William James to observe 

that “men are conjoined in a vast network of acquaintanceship. Brown knows Jones, Jones 

knows Robinson ... ; and by choosing your farther intermediaries rightly you may carry 

a message from Jones to the Empress of China, or the Chief of the African Pigmies, or to 

anyone else in the inhabited world.”9

Coping with these changing conditions, not to mention harnessing them for fi nancial gain, required learning to toggle between the micro and the macro: understanding 

how interlocking pieces fi t together into arrays almost too extensive to conceptualize. 

Business handbooks of the era are fi lled with meditations on “system,” “order,” and 

“harmony.” Among the responsibilities of steamship owners like Leyland, according 

to one Victorian shipping guide, were “the carriage of passengers, freight, and mails; 

the fi xing of the sailing schedules; and the thousand and one details which must be 

fully worked out with the various connections, scattered throughout the portions of 

the world in which the line may be directly or indirectly engaged” to guarantee “the 

utmost effi ciency and safety.”10

The systematic coordination of shipping details involved not only managing the global 

networks in which the vessels moved but also orchestrating their interior arrangements. 

For Leyland, one of the most pressing issues was achieving a correct and balanced stowage of a wide range of largely perishable materials in order to keep his steamships from 

tipping over or running aground. Representing the Liverpool Steamship Owners’ AssociFIGURE 5. Walter Crane, “Imperial Federation Map Showing the Extent of the British Empire in 1886,” Maclure & 

Co., 1886. Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

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154 Palaces of Art

ation in testimony before the House of Commons 

in 1880, Leyland explained with detailed statistical precision the problems of ship overloading 

and advised that this risk could be reduced if all 

steamers were to follow his example and subdivide their cargo holds into smaller compartments 

to prevent grain and other ballast from shifting in 

transit (Figure 6).11 On another occasion, when 

Boston’s longshoremen struck for higher wages, 

Leyland was forced to decide whether dockworkers could be replaced by untrained laborers with 

no experience in selecting, stacking, and balancing 

cargo in precisely the right order.12

Leyland’s success as a shipowner quite literally 

depended upon his ability to achieve harmonious 

arrangements of various parts. We might reconsider, then, art dealer Charles Augustus Howell’s 

complaint that Leyland was “never taken with the 

beauty of a certain pot or any thing, he only sees 

that such and such a corner requires a pot and 

then he orders one.”13 It is worth asking whether 

his tendency to order “heads” from Rossetti based 

on the rhythmic patterns they might form on the 

walls of his home tells us something about Leyland 

as a particularly clinical, even cynical, collector or 

rather underscores the fundamentally system-oriented, modular and manipulable character of Aesthetic paintings and interiors in and of themselves.14

Also worth noting in relation to Leyland’s 

mercantile career is the fact that so many Whistler paintings, including those owned by the 

Liverpool shipowner, speak a language of cosmopolitanism, often japonisme, in both form and 

content, testifying eloquently to the comings and 

goings of things in global transit, extending even to representations of the ports and 

harbors in which these exchanges occur, as Robin Spencer has noted.15 As an evocative 

supplement to these visual catalogues, English trade publications like the Pottery and Glass 

Trades’ Journal and the Furniture Gazette tracked the frequency and diversity of exports 

and imports in which Leyland’s line played an instrumental role in the 1870s and 1880s.16

Eclectic cosmopolitanism (an important element in Ayako Ono’s discussion of 

the two-way fl ow between Whistler and Japan elsewhere in this volume) is one route 

through which we might approach Aestheticism as an art that reaches out, rather than 

one that turns inward; electricity is another. Theodore Child’s description of Prince’s 

Gate in 1890 recorded “stars of electric lights” among the gas pendant lamps in the 

Peacock Room.17 They were undoubtedly Edison Swan bulbs, as Leyland served as a 

director and deputy chairman of the company from 1884. His work for Edison Swan 

involved streamlining and economizing fi nances, tracking complex patent litigation, and 

FIGURE 6. “The Method Adopted at the Port of Montreal 

for Stowing Grain Cargoes,” a diagram illustrating one 

proposed method for subdividing cargo holds, presented 

as evidence in House of Commons, “Report from the Select Committee on Merchant Shipping; Together with the 

Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and 

Appendix,” Parliamentary Papers 11 (1880): 308. Images 

published with permission of ProQuest. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Whistler and the Networked World 155

negotiating the placement of wiring systems to 

prevent their interference with other networked technologies.18

Through Leyland and his associates we 

begin to see a clearer picture of the interpenetration of electrical and Aesthetic systems at 

the turn of the century. One of Edison Swan’s 

largest contracts involved supplying bulbs to 

the premiere showcase for Aesthetic painting 

in London, the Grosvenor Gallery.19 Although 

the electrifi cation of the gallery—indeed, its 

transformation into one of London’s fi rst electrical power stations—is a story well known to 

technological historians, it usually serves only 

as a footnote in art historical accounts. But Sir 

Coutts Lindsay, proprietor of the Grosvenor, 

installed a small generator there as early as 

1883 and by 1885 had enlarged the electrical 

plant to provide power to nearby residents and 

businesses using an overhead, house-to-house 

system that linked customers in extended 

electrical chains (Figure 7). The gallery became 

a showplace for the new technology, as when Coutts Lindsay hosted a special “private 

view” for artists including Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Frederic Leighton, alongside 

investors, engineers, and journalists, to compare the effects on the pictures of gas jets 

blazing in one room against those of electric lamps glowing in the other.20

The implications of this intersection of the Aesthetic and the electrical were potentially 

both technological and social. Also connected to the Bond Street power grid was the artist 

and engineer W. A. S. Benson, whose cousin was Coutts Lindsay’s partner in the Grosvenor 

Gallery electrical venture. Benson’s electrical fi xtures featured organic designs that naturalized the new technology and blended it seamlessly into the Aesthetic homes he wired 

and decorated. Electricity, in fact, enabled artistic home decoration to achieve its ultimate 

goals. Mary Eliza Haweis had urged her readers in 1881 to remember that a “room is like a 

picture; it must be composed with equal skill and forethought,” and that “furnishing ought 

to be carried out on some sort of system.”21 Electricity bestowed upon the householder 

complete freedom to arrange the parts within this composition or system anywhere he 

or she chose. As one electrician explained in 1888, “With the incandescent lamp, unlike 

gas, [there are] no restrictions of placing for fear of burning or soiling or heating the things 

in juxtaposition, tables, walls, ceilings, tapestry, pictures—all alike are safe—only the best 

effect is to be considered.”22

In addition to serving as an electrical showcase, the Grosvenor Gallery was also a 

social showplace, as much recent scholarship has emphasized. Often lost in discussions of 

Aestheticism, fashion, and status, however, has been the real, practical value of the social 

networking that occurred in Aesthetic spaces. The lighting of the Grosvenor Gallery 

confi rms that the venue drew together individuals whose cultural tastes and investment 

interests overlapped. Leyland and his partner in electricity, James Staats Forbes, shared a 

taste for Whistler’s paintings, and both loaned works to the Grosvenor on various occaFIGURE 7. The Grosvenor Gallery electrical distribution network, 1887. Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, UK.

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156 Palaces of Art

sions. They also shared corporate leadership of the same electrical and telephone companies, and the close friendship between them was noticed, sometimes disparagingly, by 

other board members. Leyland so frequently seconded Staats Forbes’s recommendations 

at Edison Swan meetings that shareholders began to complain of a lack of transparency 

created by the “family arrangement” between the two of them.23 Their objection points 

to another characteristic of the networked nineteenth century: an increasing suspicion 

that the effectiveness of public and offi cial procedural systems might be undermined 

by “network[s] of cliquism and favoritism,” “network[s] of secret societies,” and other 

mechanisms through which power had become concentrated in closed circles, exercised 

behind closed doors.24

What role did Aesthetic interiors play in this type of social networking? Leyland did 

not have a separate offi ce in London; surely he and Staats Forbes occasionally discussed 

their networked business ventures while surrounded by Leyland’s carefully coordinated 

Aesthetic and technological arrangements. Although we can only speculate about Staats 

Forbes, in the case of Sir Thomas Sutherland—friend to Leyland and Whistler, minister of 

Parliament, and chairman of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company—we 

have at least one business associate whose presence in the Peacock Room can be confi rmed.25 Sutherland told Joseph and Elizabeth Robins Pennell that he knew Leyland well 

and worked with him often, had visited his houses in Liverpool and London, and saw the 

Peacock Room for himself.26 He credited Leyland with introducing him to Whistler, and he 

served both as the trustee managing the Leylands’ legal separation and as the chairman of 

Whistler’s bankruptcy committee.27

Sutherland was a guest at the artist’s breakfasts and a purchaser of at least two of 

his paintings; at one point he even asked Whistler to draw up a decorative program for 

his home that may have resembled the scheme for Whistler’s own White House, with its 

yellow parlor.28 Again, in Sutherland, we encounter a patron particularly drawn to Whistler’s systematic interiors and serial paintings who was also one of the premiere network builders of his age. At his death in 1922, the Times observed that “he took a more 

active part than probably any other man of his time in the expansion of that network of 

communication with both the Far East and Australia which has exercised so important 

an infl uence on our commerce and our Empire.”29 He was the founder of the Hong Kong 

and Shanghai Bank (now known as HSBC), a lead negotiator in the opening of the Suez 

Canal to British shipping interests, and chairman of a major steamship line tasked with 

carrying passengers, cargo, and the British mail.

Sutherland, like Leyland, understood the social value of Aesthetic design. He deployed it in at least twelve ships commissioned by the Peninsular and Oriental Steam 

Navigation Company (P&O) in the 1880s and 1890s. Through the architects Wallace & 

Flockhart and Thomas E. Collcutt, Sutherland as chairman of the P&O ordered thousands of tiles from Aesthetic ceramicist William De Morgan for the fi rst-class saloons, 

smoking rooms, and corridors of his passenger steamers (Figure 8) and was personally 

involved in their decoration to the point of becoming, in De Morgan’s words, a “highly 

meddlesome pragmatic body.”30

As design historian David Brett has provocatively suggested, De Morgan’s custom 

work for the P&O “gave their fi rst-class passengers the experience of a fl oating Aesthetic movement.”31 But what was the nature of that experience? As one might expect, 

these decorative components served as markers that stratifi ed the passenger traffi c 

into various “classes” of clientele, and as new ships were opened to tours for the pubWhistlerBook.indb 156 WhistlerBook.indb 156 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
Whistler and the Networked World 157

lic and the press, artistically coordinated spaces served 

as colorful advertisements for the line. In their eclectic 

exoticism, De Morgan’s tiles conceptually mapped out 

the Eastern routes of the ships and hinted at the cargo 

they carried. But of equal, though perhaps less obvious, importance, they served as a frame for the social, 

political, and corporate networking that took place on 

board, most notably among the select circle that called 

themselves “fi rst trippers.”

The fi rst trippers were the exclusive list of invitees 

to join Sutherland for the P&O’s weekend-long trial 

trips—opportunities to test each luxury vessel’s speed 

and comfort before it was deployed in the company’s 

service. Parliamentary observer Henry Lucy was a 

frequent guest among the fi rst trippers, who included, 

in his accounting, “hard-worked statesmen, judges, 

barristers, painters, and men of letters,” some of whom 

set aside business rivalries and partisan political disputes in order to socialize and indulge in the hospitality 

offered on board. Food, drink, and amusement fl owed 

freely, leading to such after-dinner hijinks as Sutherland 

and Sir John Aird, collector of Aesthetic painting and 

builder of the Aswan Dam, joining in a sword dance on 

deck in the moonlight.32

On these occasions, De Morgan’s tile work formed 

an elegant, interconnected background framing these Aesthetic salons, hosted by 

Sutherland, who was known in his business affairs for advocating cooperation rather 

than competition as the key to success—so assiduously, in fact, that he was eventually 

called to testify about his participation in price-fi xing schemes before his fellow parliamentarians.33 Even those not directly involved in establishing cooperative arrangements 

with Sutherland found in the trial trips ample proof of his managerial skill. “Enormous 

organization, truly,” mused one fi rst-tripping journalist as he surveyed the extent of the 

P&O’s operations, “all dependent on the general supervision of the [company’s offi ce] at 

Leadenhall-street, and all working in one harmonious whole.”34

Whistler, as it turns out, was also among the fi rst trippers. One weekend while he 

was negotiating with Leyland over the Peacock Room, Whistler and a few of his friends 

were invited to join Sutherland on a trial voyage departing from Southampton, all expenses paid. Shortly after that adventure, Whistler painted a picture that memorialized 

the night they embarked, perhaps something quite similar to the Southampton Nocturne 

now in the Freer Gallery of Art. Sutherland declined to purchase it.35 But the entire 

incident draws at least one of Whistler’s ethereal Nocturnes into a surprisingly concrete 

networked context.

The surviving Nocturne in Black and Gold: Entrance to Southampton Water (YMSM 179) 

may or may not be the Nocturne that Sutherland declined; it eventually set sail across 

the Atlantic and found its way into the hands of railroad car builder Charles Lang Freer, 

who passionately shared the works of his favorite artist with his closest business collaborators. An evocative letter from William K. Bixby, St. Louis capitalist and president of 

FIGURE 8. William De Morgan et al., 

tile panel, originally designed for the 

Sutlej P&O liner, painted on blanks by 

William De Morgan, about 1882. 

© Victoria and Albert Museum, 

London. 

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158 Palaces of Art

the American Car and Foundry Company, eloquently captures the social and aesthetic 

experience of viewing Whistlers in Freer’s Detroit home: 

I shall never forget the wonderful days I spent at 33 Ferry with 

you, and can close my eyes and ... go to those days when seated 

in your home with a glass of Scotch we saw your Whistler the 

seminocturn [sic] perform its stunt of being fi ve different pictures 

in twelve hours depending on light & shade. ... I can close my 

eyes and see the Whistlers, ... the prints, the screens ... the 

Peacock room. ... It has all been a glorious memory and 

an inspiration.36

Acquired by Freer twelve years after Leyland’s death, the Peacock Room was 

transported fi rst to Detroit and later to Washington, DC, for permanent installation in 

the Freer Gallery of Art. In Freer’s home it lost its function as a dining room and served 

instead as a frame for Freer’s collection of Asian pottery as well as for his self-presentation as the anti-Leyland: the patron always eager to accommodate the artist’s wishes and 

to preserve his legacy as faithfully as possible. 

If the Whistler-Leyland relationship had infamously exploded in a hail of fl ying 

peacock feathers, Freer hoped instead to cultivate harmony—and “harmony” was the 

watchword of his art collection, business practice, and domestic life. Freer and Bixby, 

in fact, urged the use of Freer’s Aesthetic home in Detroit as a place in which to fi nalize delicate business negotiations, including the price-fi xing agreements that led to the 

formation of the American Car and Foundry Company, a massive railroad-car-building 

trust engineered by Freer and his associates in 1899.37 Even a decade before the Peacock 

Room arrived on American shores, Freer had fully embraced Whistler’s totalizing approach to aesthetic experience and home decoration, employing Dwight William Tryon 

and Thomas Wilmer Dewing to create series of related canvases and tone the walls of 

his reception hall and parlor to match them in shimmering, opalescent shades of blue, 

green, and silver.38 As Freer and his collaborative partners repeatedly emphasized in their 

letters, their overall goal was to “harmonize” this space, and it in turn became a crucible 

for the harmonization of competing interests during this period of “merger mania” and 

interlocking directorates.39

As they had in England, Whistler’s paintings, prints, and totalizing approach to interior 

decoration found a particularly enthusiastic reception in America among art patrons and 

collectors skilled in the art of network management and manipulation. A signifi cant number 

of them—including Freer and his midwestern business partners Bixby and Frank J. Hecker, 

as well as Cleveland industrialists J. H. Whittemore and Alfred Atmore Pope—were 

involved in the manufacture of railroad cars and their standardized, but also highly variable, 

component parts. Other prominent Whistler partisans specialized in corporation and 

merger law, namely, Philadelphian John G. Johnson and New York attorney Howard Mansfi eld, who fi rst sparked Freer’s interest in the artist. Within this community of like-minded 

collectors and businessmen, a shared taste for Whistler’s works sometimes reinforced 

corporate links between the nodes: partnership-friendships in the Freer-Hecker-Bixby and 

Whittemore-Pope clusters were borne out by extensively and intimately overlapping art 

collections.

Among the reasons for the attraction of these types of businessmen to the works of 

this artist, doubtless the most crucial is the sheer fact of circumstance: art collecting was 

an expensive undertaking, and the activities most likely to generate disposable income 

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Whistler and the Networked World 159

during America’s age of incorporation were 

grounded in large, often globally oriented, vertically and horizontally integrated concerns.40 Indeed, a number of art historians have suggested 

that it was precisely the network-driven pressures of the kind outlined by George Beard in 

his physiological treatise American Nervousness 

(1881)—the exhausting effects of “the heightened activity of the cerebral circulation which 

is made necessary for a businessman since the 

introduction of steam-power, the telegraph, the 

telephone, and the morning newspaper”—that 

drove businessman-patrons and -collectors to 

take refuge in the ethereal, apparently cloistered, decorative canvases of Whistler and his 

artistic successors and to cocoon themselves 

inside the restorative harmonies of their 

Aesthetic interiors.41 But any attempt to cast 

Aestheticism as serving a primarily escapist or 

compensatory function must also consider that 

men like Freer and Mansfi eld spent their leisure 

hours engaged in connoisseurial and curatorial 

pursuits that transposed—rather than transcended—the rigors of corporate organization 

and management into an aesthetic register. 

Freer, in theory and practice, embodied a conviction that beauty was best achieved 

and appreciated through constant manipulation, rearrangement, and comparison. His 

preferred program of artistic encounter involved enlisting his caretaker, Stephen Warring, to retrieve carefully chosen paintings, pottery, and other treasures through which 

he could engineer new and provocative aesthetic juxtapositions, a strategy captured 

most famously in Alvin Langdon Coburn’s portrait photograph of the collector (Figure 9). 

This practice stripped the art objects of their cultural specifi cities and contextual histories, rendering them comparable, comprehensible exemplars of what Freer considered 

to be universal aesthetic principles; it was through this method that Whistler—in Ernest 

F. Fenollosa’s extraordinarily prescient phrasing—emerged as “the nodule, the universalizer, the interpreter of East to West, and of West to East.”42 Just as Whistler’s Venus 

Rising from the Sea (1868–70, Freer Gallery of Art; YMSM 93) serves in Coburn’s photograph as foil to an Islamic glazed vessel, the Peacock Room, as porcelain cabinet and 

frame, offered the possibilities and pleasures of near-infi nite aesthetic recombinations, 

extending the comparative logic of the Princesse into three-dimensional space.

Contemporary business handbooks like those produced by Horace Lucien Arnold 

at the turn of the century underscore the degree to which industrial concerns like Freer 

and Hecker’s Michigan-Peninsular Car Company and Whittemore and Pope’s Cleveland 

Malleable Iron Company depended upon the comparative and organizational aptitudes 

of their managers to ensure the harmonization of parts, people, and subsidiaries into 

functioning wholes. “Value,” Arnold reminded his readers, “can be fi xed only by comparison. To know any one thing fully and entirely, many other similar and related things must 

FIGURE 9. Alvin Langdon Coburn, Portrait of Charles Lang Freer, 

1909. Albumen print. Charles Lang Freer Papers, Freer Gallery of 

Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 

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160 Palaces of Art

be known.”43 Moreover, as a specialist in the complexities of modern industrial accounting, Freer evidently savored the paired curatorial practices of addition and subtraction, 

continually “revising” his holdings and advising contemporary collectors like John Gellatly 

that “both limitation and elimination must be judiciously practiced or a collection ... 

will prove over-crowded and in many ways valueless.”44 To cite one fi nal example of the 

parallels between Aesthetic connoisseurship and system-oriented managerial practice, 

the year 1892 found Howard Mansfi eld assisting Freer and Hecker with a merger of the 

Michigan and Peninsular car-building companies while simultaneously picking out wall 

coverings and planning arrangements of Whistler etchings for a harmonious display at the 

World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, translating the total coordination of the Princesse

and the Peacock Room into an exhibition space, just as Whistler himself had done.45

As Lee Glazer has discovered, Freer and Mansfi eld collaboratively assembled a number 

of Whistler exhibitions together, including the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in Boston’s 

Copley Hall in the spring of 1904, where the Princesse served as centerpiece and conceptual 

touchstone (Figure 10). Later that year, the comparative logic that Freer had learned from 

Mansfi eld and Whistler became the central conceit structuring the selection and hanging 

of nearly two hundred works at the Comparative Exhibition of Native and Foreign Art, organized by the Society of Art Collectors, Incorporated. The corporate form of this organizing body—to which Mansfi eld, Freer, and Hecker belonged, along with other dedicated 

collectors of American Aesthetic and Tonalist paintings—was not unusual for its time, but 

it is revealing: the extensive overlap among the individuals involved in both 1904 exhibitions 

FIGURE 10. Whistler Memorial Exhibition, 1904. Copley Hall. Photograph by Thomas Marr. Charles Lang Freer 

Papers, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 

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Whistler and the Networked World 161

and other similarly harmonious, unifi ed presentations at New York’s gentlemen’s clubs and 

other venues brings into sharper focus the small body of decision makers who had constituted themselves as an unoffi cial board of directors of American art. Embracing the rhetoric of trusteeship with which they were well acquainted from their leadership commitments in the world of savings banks, insurance, and investment management, art patrons 

like Freer, William T. Evans, William K. Bixby, and John Gellatly considered it their duty to 

make responsible decisions for the masses and for all time about which works of art American museums should preserve and even how they should be hung. A taste for American 

Aestheticism linked them, and they exhibited a dedication to Whistlerian exhibition unities, 

manifested, for example, by Evans’s insistence upon particular shades of “Dundee Drapery” 

to be used in the hanging of his collection at the Smithsonian Institution, even after he had 

given it to the nation.46

Of this group, Freer represents the most extreme case of systems management in 

which the organizational skills required to run a large and thoroughly integrated railroadcar-building concern were applied with equal fervor to the organization of an art collection. 

His generous gift to the Smithsonian came with a number of limiting conditions to preserve 

the collection—in Freer’s words—as “a harmonious whole.”47 His planning of the Freer 

Gallery in the years before his death extended even to considerations of symmetrical hanging, as when he commissioned Abbott Thayer to paint “one more landscape approximately 

the size of ‘Capri,’ ‘Monadnock,’ or the ‘Study of the Cornish Coast’” that “would help 

materially in balancing the hanging ... so as to make the whole harmonious in every way.”48

Among his carefully planned gifts was the Peacock Room. As an Aesthetic artifact, 

this installation remains truly singular, but its confi gurations have been multiple, and the 

comparative juxtapositions it facilitates endlessly extensible. The experiences of looking, 

rearranging, and socializing that it frames constitute the essential foundation of a networked aestheticism for a networked world. Because the particular concept of beauty that 

Whistler and so many of his contemporaries chose to pursue was iterative, comparative, 

and conceptualized in variations on set themes, these works of art, however closely associated with a discourse of retreat and withdrawal, necessarily reach out and extend, creating 

a network of highly self-aware patrons who understood their collections as nodes within 

larger arrays.

Notes

 1. Arthur Symons, Studies in Seven Arts (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1906), 129–30, emphasis added. The chapter is dated 1903/1905.

 2. Elizabeth Prettejohn, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (New Haven, 

CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 

2007), 2. For recent studies of Whistler’s “science,” see also Marc Simpson, “Whistler, Modernism, and the Creative Affl atus,” in Like Breath on Glass: Whistler and the 

Art of Painting Softly (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 

2008), 24–51; Sarah Elizabeth Kelly, “Camera Lens and Mind’s Eye: James McNeill 

Whistler and the Science of Art” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010).

 3. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 14.

 4. Cosmo Monkhouse, “Albert Moore,” Magazine of Art 8 (1885): 94.

 5. For the most complete history of the Peacock Room, see Linda Merrill, The Peacock 

Room: A Cultural Biography (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1998).

WhistlerBook.indb 161 WhistlerBook.indb 161 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
162 Palaces of Art

 6. This thesis is developed in greater depth in Melody Barnett Deusner, “A Network of 

Associations: Aesthetic Painting and Its Patrons, 1870–1914” (PhD diss., University of 

Delaware, 2010).

 7. Whistler to William Heinemann, September 9 or 16, 1899, PWC.

 8. See Deusner, “Network of Associations,” 40–52. Mark Wigley has also noted the 

shift from concrete to conceptual uses of “network” in “Network Fever,” Grey Room

4 (Summer 2001): 94.

 9. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lessons on Philosophy (London: Longmans, 1907), 132.

 10. Arthur J. Maginnis, The Atlantic Ferry, Its Ships, Men, and Working (London, 1892), 134.

 11. Testimony of Frederick Leyland, July 5, 1880, in House of Commons, “Report from 

the Select Committee on Merchant Shipping; Together with the Proceedings of the 

Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix,” Parliamentary Papers 11 (1880): 

192–200.

 12. “Longshoremen’s Wages,” Boston Daily Globe, November 18, 1878, 1.

 13. Charles Augustus Howell to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, March 4, 1873, in The Owl 

and the Rossettis: Letters of Charles A. Howell and Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William 

Michael Rossetti, ed. C. L. Cline (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 

1978), letter 207.

 14. On Rossetti “heads” for Leyland, see The Rossetti-Leyland Letters: The Correspondence 

of an Artist and His Patron, ed. Francis L. Fennell Jr. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 

1978); Kathy Alexis Psomiades, “Hidden Just behind These Screens: Art Objects and 

Commodities,” in Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 94–133.

 15. Robin Spencer, “Whistler’s Early Relations with Britain and the Signifi cance of Industry 

and Commerce for His Art, Part II,” Burlington Magazine 136, no. 1099 (October 1994): 

671.

 16. See, for example, the published listings for F. Leyland & Co. in the regular shipping 

logs of china, glass, and earthenware exported from Liverpool in the Pottery and 

Glass Trades’ Journal 1 (1878) and 2 (1879), as well as furniture and carpets imported 

into Liverpool in the Furniture Gazette (October–December 1882).

 17. Theodore Child, “A Pre-Raphaelite Mansion,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, December 1890, 82.

 18. For Leyland’s role at Edison Swan, see reports of shareholders’ meetings published in 

the Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 1884–92.

 19. “Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, Limited,” Telegraphic Journal and 

Electrical Review, November 2, 1888, 495.

 20. “Electric Lighting at the Grosvenor Gallery,” Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, 

April 18, 1885, 358.

 21. Mary Eliza Haweis, The Art of Decoration (London, 1881), 10, 201.

22. H. Swan, “Artistic Electric Lighting,” Electrical Engineer, March 9, 1888, 224.

 23. “Swan United Electric Light Company,” Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, December 20, 1884, 503.

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Whistler and the Networked World 163

 24. Archibald Forbes, Chinese Gordon: A Succinct Record of His Life (New York, 1884), 140; 

“What About Ireland?” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October 1885, 551.

 25. See Edwin A. Ward, Recollections of a Savage (New York: Stokes, 1920), 263.

 26. Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Whistler Journal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1921), 107.

 27. For Sutherland’s trusteeship in the Leyland separation, see reports on Conolan v. 

Leyland, June 20 and August 8, 1884, in Law Times 51 (February 28, 1885): 895–98.

 28. Sadakichi Hartmann described a planned Whistler interior for Sutherland, although 

his chronology is incorrect; see Hartmann, The Whistler Book (Boston: L. C. Page, 

1910), 106. See also Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James 

McNeill Whistler, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1911), 159.

 29. “Sir T. Sutherland. Life Work for the P. & O. Company. From Junior Clerk to Chairman,” The Times, January 2, 1922, 9.

 30. William De Morgan to Halsey Ricardo, February 18, 1895, De Morgan Foundation, 

quoted in Jon Catleugh, William De Morgan Tiles (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 

1983), 110.

 31. David Brett, C. R. Mackintosh: The Poetics of Workmanship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard 

University Press, 1992), 21.

 32. Henry Lucy, Sixty Years in the Wilderness (New York: Dutton, 1909–16), 3:194, 197.

 33. Royal Commission on Shipping Rings, 1909, Cd. 4668–70. For the P&O’s perspective 

on Sutherland and the cooperative “conference system,” see David Divine, These 

Splendid Ships: The Story of the Peninsular and Oriental Line (London: F. Muller, 1960), 

162–64.

 34. “Taken on Trial,” All the Year Round 176 (April 13, 1872): 473.

 35. Ward, Recollections of a Savage, 263–66.

 36. William K. Bixby to Charles Lang Freer, May 5, 1919, FGAA.

 37. For correspondence discussing the formation and meetings of the Committee of 

Seven, see Freer to Bixby, May 23, 1896; July 8, 1897; September 6 and 29, 1897; 

and October 6 and 13, 1897, FGAA; and Bixby to J. L. Smyser, September 9, 1897, 

William K. Bixby Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.

 38. On the decoration of the Freer house, see Thomas Brunk, “The Charles L. Freer 

Residence: The Original Freer Gallery of Art,” Dichotomy 12 (Fall 1999): 6–150.

 39. See, for example, Dwight William Tryon to Freer, April 5, 1891, FGAA.

 40. On the wide range of social and cultural effects of incorporation in nineteenth-century America, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society 

in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

 41. George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York, 

1881), 117. On Aesthetic paintings as “rest cures,” see Sarah Burns, Inventing the 

Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University 

Press, 1996); Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought 

in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).

 42. Ernest F. Fenollosa, “The Collection of Mr. Charles L. Freer,” Pacifi c Era 2 (November 1907): 61.

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164 Palaces of Art

 43. Horace Lucien Arnold, The Complete Cost-Keeper (New York, 1900), 2; see also 

Arnold, The Factory Manager and Accountant: Some Examples of the Latest American 

Factory Practice (New York: Engineering Magazine Press, 1903).

 44. Freer to John Gellatly, November 17, 1917, FGAA.

 45. For correspondence between Mansfi eld and Freer regarding this merger, see Freer 

to Mansfi eld, May 30, September 20, and November 2 and 30, 1892, FGAA. Efforts by Mansfi eld and Freer to organize exhibitions on Whistlerian principles, both 

individually and in collaboration, are discussed by Lee Glazer, “‘A Modern Instance’: 

Thomas Dewing and Aesthetic Vision at the Turn of the Century” (PhD diss., 

University of Pennsylvania, 1996); Glazer, “Whistler, America, and the Memorial 

Exhibition of 1904,” in After Whistler: The Artist and His Infl uence on American Painting,

ed. Linda Merrill (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2004), 86–96.

 46. See correspondence between William T. Evans and Richard Rathbun, June 9 and 15, 

1909, Evans Registrar’s Files, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

 47. Freer to Samuel P. Langley, January 18, 1905, FGAA.

 48. Freer to Abbott Thayer, August 12, 1912, FGAA.

WhistlerBook.indb 164 WhistlerBook.indb 164 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Networks of Modernism: 

A New Look at Whistler in Japan

Ayako Ono

I

t is well known that James McNeill Whistler looked to 

Japanese art in developing an original artistic style that 

challenged the narrative conventions of Victorian painting and asserted his belief in Art for Art’s Sake.1

 What 

is less well known is that the connection between the 

painter and Japan was not a one-way street but a complex network of cultural and aesthetic emulation. After 

the opening of Japan in 1854, the country embarked on a 

decades-long process of assimilating aspects of modern 

Western civilization. Learning the techniques and syntax 

of Western art was part of this general modernization 

effort, and Whistler’s idea of Art for Art’s Sake expressed 

in the Ten O’Clock lecture (delivered 1885) and The Gentle 

Art of Making Enemies (1890) was understood in Japan as 

an exemplary theory of Western avant-garde aesthetics. 

Whistler had looked to Japan in the 1860s to effect his 

own aesthetic transformation; after the turn of the twentieth century, Japanese artists, critics, and writers engaged 

in a reciprocal act of artistic appropriation.

The arrival of the American Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853 brought about the end of Japan’s 

two-centuries-long period of isolation. From this date on, there was genuine contact 

between the West and Japan, and during the Meiji era (1868–1912), Japan abandoned 

its feudal social structure and quickly adopted Western political, social, and economic 

models. In this context of rapid upheaval and change, “civilization” became a key word 

for the Japanese government, signifying its desire to become a member of the industrialized, modern world. And “civilization” essentially meant Westernization—for art and 

literature as well as for government and commerce. At the very early stages of Westernization, Japanese artists learned techniques of oil painting and established a new 

genre called Yo- ga, that is, Western-style painting. They also adopted from the West the 

practice of organizing exhibitions and publishing art journals. The very term bijutsu, which 

means fi ne art, was coined on the occasion of Japan’s participation in the Vienna World’s 

Fair in 1873. Bijutsu was used rather broadly at the time and referred to music, painting, 

sculpture, and poetry.

The art dealer Hayashi Tadamasa (Figure 1) played an important role in introducing 

FIGURE 1. Portrait of Hayashi Tadamasa (1853–

1906). Private collection.

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166 Palaces of Art

Japanese art to Europe. Hayashi, who spoke 

French fl uently, went to Paris in 1878 as an 

interpreter for the third Paris World’s Fair. 

He later became an art dealer based in Paris. 

Not only did he sell Japanese goods to collectors such as Louis Gonse and the Goncourt 

brothers, but he also talked about Japanese art 

with French enthusiasts, providing information, 

knowledge, and advice, which contributed 

greatly to the popularity of japonisme. Hayashi 

also had extensive contacts throughout Europe 

and was aware of the currents of the art world 

there. In 1887, he wrote a letter to introduce 

Whistler’s student Mortimer Menpes to Shinagawa Yajiro of the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo 

(Figure 2), stating that Menpes was “a friend of 

a well-known British painter, Whistler.”2

 Although Hayashi’s direct contact with Whistler 

is not known, it is obvious that he was aware that the painter was active in the forefront 

of the artistic world and invoked his name to cultivate cross-cultural artistic connections. 

Hayashi also expected infl uential Japanese politicians who had been in France, Britain, 

and Germany in the early 1870s to know Whistler’s name, so that Shinagawa would 

support Mortimer Menpes. 

Hayashi played an important part in the debate over the concept of bijutsu more 

than a decade after the term was coined. Professor Toyama Masakazu of Tokyo Imperial University presented a lecture, “The Future of Japanese Painting,” at Meiji Bijutsukai 

in June 1890.3 He argued that the problem with contemporary Japanese paintings was 

their subject matter. Hayashi refuted this assertion in an 1890 lecture, “On Dr. Toyama’s 

Speech,” arguing that the main issue was the acquisition of technique and emphasizing 

the importance of visual art. Hayashi also cited Whistler’s artistic ideas in support of his 

understanding of bijutsu: 

The English painter Whistler produces unprecedented landscape 

paintings with musical terms and colors in the title, and when 

he held exhibitions in London, he opened the eyes of all the 

doctrinaire artists. ... Painting is like music to please the eyes, 

that is to say, it is the harmony of beauty. ... Art is to feel things 

and bear them in our hearts. Art is full of feelings and emanates 

towards the outside.4

Hayashi’s discussion reminds us of a passage from Whistler’s “Red Rag”: 

Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand 

alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without 

confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as 

devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no 

kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my 

works “arrangements” and “harmonies.”5

Whistler’s use of musical terms was derived from his understanding of aestheticism. 

In his works he arranged composition, space, and harmony of color to attain Art for 

FIGURE 2. Letter from Hayashi Tadamasa to Shinagwa Yajiro, 

dated Meiji 20 (1887), January 14, Paris. National Diet Library, 

Tokyo.

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Whistler in Japan 167

Art’s Sake. Hayashi, in turn, saw Whistler’s 

work as exemplifying the “beauty of harmony.” 

This Whistlerian idea would have important 

reverberations in Japanese literature and aesthetic theory in the years to come.

Although Whistler had been known in 

Japan during his lifetime, his aesthetic theories 

only began to circulate widely after his death.6

Whistler’s obituary appeared in the foreign 

bulletin section of the art journal Bijutsu shinpoof October 5, 1903, three months after the 

artist’s death, when he was described as an 

“extraordinary person in the contemporary art 

world.” The next year, Bijutsu shinpo- published 

an article on the Whistler Memorial Exhibition 

held in Boston.7 In 1905, the art critic Sakai Gisaburo-

 (Saisui; 1871–1940) published “Whistler, 

a Critical Biography” in a magazine called Sketch

(Figure 3). Sakai described Whistler as “a prominent fi gure in the history of nineteenth-century 

painting” and added that he thought “he should 

really be considered an extraordinary fi gure in 

modern painting history.” Whistler’s rejection 

of moral or anecdotal meanings from his works 

was particularly important, he said, in order to 

pursue “the beauty of the harmony of colors” 

and “the beauty of the style.” Sakai also wrote 

about Whistler’s aestheticism, referring to the 

Ten O’Clock lecture and The Gentle Art of Making 

Enemies, and explained how Whistler had loved 

Japanese art and had been infl uenced in particular by Hiroshige and Hokusai, whose teachings 

he had put to good use. Many of Whistler’s 

artistic principles were suggested to him by 

Japanese art, Sakai observed, pointing out that 

the works Whistler produced by establishing 

a unique style infl uenced by Japanese art had 

shocked the European art world.8

Whistler was introduced to Japan as a “contemporary” painter. It was reported in Ho- sun that 

Japanese pupils of the French painters Raphaël 

Collin and Jean-Paul Laurens fi rst introduced 

Whistler to Japan.9 Indeed, the Western-style painter Kume Keiichiro- (Figure 4), who 

went to Paris and studied under Raphaël Collin, was one of the earliest fi gures to write 

articles on Whistler. He stayed in France from 1886 to 1893 and played a leading role 

in the Yo- ga during the Meiji era. In 1906, Kume wrote a biography of Whistler for Ko- fu- , 

“An Aspect of Whistler’s Life,” published in three parts.10 In these articles Kume provided a

FIGURE 3. Sakai Gisaburo-, “Whistler, a Critical Biography,” 

Sketch, no. 5 (1905): 14–15.

FIGURE 4. Portrait of Kume Keiichiro-

 (1866–1934). Kume Museum of Art, Tokyo.

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168 Palaces of Art

detailed biography of Whistler and analyzed his works carefully. He also pointed out the infl uence of Japanese art on Whistler’s works. With regard to the early so-called Japanesque 

paintings, such as Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen (Figure 5), Kume, who was 

a painter himself, speculated that Whistler had “just gathered novelties to try to achieve 

a harmony of unusual vivid colors.”11 Kume concluded that Whistler had not painted his 

orientalizing works with an understanding of Japanese art, but instead painted them out of 

simple “eccentricity,” using items such as Japanese lacquer ware and ceramics as materials for still-life vignettes within larger paintings and incorporating screens, fans, dolls, and 

clothes as fanciful additions to the paintings. 

Kume did point out that Whistler’s “Japanese taste” did not stop with the creation 

of an exotic atmosphere: the painter instead continued his exploration of Japanese 

taste with a pure spirit, and although a curiosity about novelties can be seen in his 

work until 1867, he afterward chose, analyzed, and interpreted formal elements of 

Japanese art and elaborated principles based on careful consideration.12 Kume thus 

expressed what has become the standard view of Whistler’s development of a Japanese-infl ected aesthetic, moving from pastiche to synthesis.

Specifi cally, Kume identifi ed Hiroshige’s infl uence in the way Whistler drew the 

horizon higher in pictures showing the sea or a river and in his night scenes, in which 

fi reworks go off against the night sky (see Arscott, Figure 5). Kume noted how the higher 

horizon in Whistler’s bird’s-eye-view paintings was not necessarily an allusion to Japanese 

art: Whistler, used to seeing Japanese prints, had arrived at those representations natuFIGURE 5. James McNeill Whistler, Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, 1864. Oil on wood panel, 50.1 × 

68.5 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.75.

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Whistler in Japan 169

rally, and in fact, this perspective existed in the West, too, 

even though it was not customary to employ it. According to 

Kume, Whistler’s interest in 

Japanese art eventually led him 

to paint a series of Nocturnes 

in the 1870s. Kume explained 

how, in the Nocturnes, the 

color scheme was fundamental 

and how the paintings were 

not meant to depict nature but 

were “spontaneous, eloquent 

celebrations” and “magnifi cent 

poetry of the darkness of the 

night”: Whistler “loved the 

shadows as shadows, and the 

dark night as dark night. He 

used the light of the fi res to 

bring out the beautiful colors 

of the shadows and the dark 

night.”13

It is worthy of note that 

another article by Kume, 

“Whistler vs. Ruskin and the 

Origin of Impressionism,” 

was published in the literary 

magazine Myo- jo- .

14 Representative of Meiji era romanticism, Myo- jo- was the magazine of the 

association Shinshisha (New Poetry Society), based in Tokyo. Published between April 

1900 and November 1908, it was self-defi ned as a “magazine specializing in literature and 

art” and a “monthly magazine of literature and art with images.”15 Myo- jo- was fi rst published in 1900, the year of the Paris Exposition Universelle, when the Art Nouveau style 

grabbed the limelight. Yo- ga painters such as Fujishima Takeji, who was much infl uenced by 

Art Nouveau, especially by Alphonse Mucha, contributed illustrations for the front page 

(Figure 6). As Hideo Takumi pointed out, “The new role of uniting literature and painting 

is something that can’t be overlooked in terms of the great importance Myo- jo- assumed in 

cultural history.”16 Myo- jo- tried to fuse literature and art and played an epochal role in the 

history of literary trends in modern Japan.

The infl uence that Whistler’s works exercised on the literary world was the result 

of the modern Japanese phenomenon of the blending of visual art and literature that 

began with the founding of Myo- jo- . Between 1903 and 1918, Whistler was introduced 

to Japan not only in art magazines such as Bijutsu shinpo- but also in literary magazines 

such as Waseda bungaku and Geibun and in journals that aimed to be a synthesis of visual 

art and literature, such as Myo- jo- and Ho- sun. Indeed, these literary sources underscore 

Whistler’s importance to “modern” Japanese aesthetic endeavors. The reception and 

infl uence of Whistler in Japan thus extended beyond the visual arts to the literary 

world. A book design by Hashiguchi Goyo- (Figure 7), for instance, shows that WhisFIGURE 6. Fijishima Takeji, Myojo-

 2 (1902), front page.

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170 Palaces of Art

tler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of Thomas Carlyle (1872, City Art Gallery, 

Glasgow; YMSM 137) was known in Japan by 1906. The poet Kinoshita Mokutaro-

(1885–1945) subtitled one of his poems “Inspired by Whistler’s Painting. ”17 And Kitahara 

Hakushu- (1885–1942) composed one of the best-known poems inspired by Whistler’s 

work, “Blue and Gold” of 1910: 

Nocturne in Blue and Gold

Duet of Spring and Summer

Song of Edo for Young Tokyo

Shade and Light in my heart.18

In his 1917 short story “Supein-ken no ie” (“The House of a Spanish Dog”), SatoHaruo (1892–1964), known as one of the writers of aestheticism in Japan, alludes to 

Whistler’s paintings. Upon entering a Western-style house in an unfamiliar forest, the 

protagonist fi nds “a heliochrome sea-piece” hanging on the wall: “I’ve seen this picture 

before somewhere—isn’t that Whistler’s colouring? I strongly approve of having such a 

picture here. Anyone secluded among hills like this would probably forget that the world 

contained such things as the sea unless he had a picture to remind him.”19

Whistler’s aestheticism became widely known in Japanese literary circles after 1908, 

when the Western-style painter and print artist Ishii Hakutei (1882–1958) published a 

translation of Whistler’s Ten O’Clock lecture in Ho- sun.

20 Like Myo- jo- 

, Ho- sun was a magazine that aimed to be a synthesis of visual art and literature. Published between 1907 and 

1910, it was closely modeled on the German magazine Jugend, fi rst published in 1896. The

interaction between works of art and literature and the creation of a new genre of magazine was the purpose of the publication. Ishii Hakutei, an editor of Myo- jo- 

, was also chief 

editor of Ho- sun. The magazines published 

not only prints but also literary works 

such as poems or short dramas. Kinoshita 

Mokutaro- and Kitahara Hakushu- , who 

wrote poems inspired by Whistler, were 

active as regular contributors. The young 

artists and writers who were contributors to Ho- sun, including Ishii Hakutei and 

Sato- Haruo, were loosely centered around 

the group Pan no kai (Association of the 

Greek God Pan). Rather than realistic art, 

they preferred to write creative stories or 

evocative poems appealing to the senses, 

exhibiting human sensuality and decadent 

aestheticism, set in historical times and 

exotic places.21

The young artists and writers of Pan 

no kai promoted a new movement of 

aestheticist tendencies. At the turn of 

the century, artists searched for the lost 

atmosphere of the Edo period, before the 

forcible opening of Japan in the middle of 

the nineteenth century brought radical 

FIGURE 7. Hashiguchi Goyo- (1880–1921), “Carlyle Museum,” in Natsume So- seki, Yokyoshu-

 (1906).

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Whistler in Japan 171

change to Japanese social systems, lifestyle, and culture. They were especially drawn to 

the banks of the Sumida River, where Hiroshige had depicted nocturnal scenes. These 

young artists were not simply nostalgic for Edo. Rather, the riverside atmosphere, redolent of the traditional Japanese culture that matured during the Edo period, seemed 

exotic to them. Thus, Nocturnes such as Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge 

that were inspired by Hiroshige’s art served as models—a mixture of old and new—for 

them. In the world of Japanese modern literature, the works of Whistler inspired by 

Japanese ukiyo-e stimulated a kind of nostalgic exoticism.22

In 1890, the year that he published The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, Whistler 

met Kaneko Kentaro, a Japanese politician and bureaucrat, at the Athenaeum Club 

in London. The artist told Kaneko that he would like to learn about Japanese art but 

that there were no books he could read on the subject. He wondered if there was a 

Japanese artist who could possibly explain it.23 Whistler had no idea that his art had 

already been introduced to Japan. Moreover, he did not live to see how his artistic 

ideas and works inspired by Japanese art in turn greatly impacted Japan, becoming a 

source of inspiration for Japanese visual and literary artists of the next generation. This 

cross-cultural interchange was as essential to the creation of a new culture of artistic 

modernity in the East as it was in the West. 

Notes

 1. On the Japanese infl uence on Whistler’s art, see Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: 

Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and Nineteenth-Century Japan (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).

 2. Hayashi to Shinagawa Yajiro, dated Meiji 20 (1887), January 14, Paris, in Kigi Yasuko, 

Hayashi Tadamasa to sono jidai [Hayashi Tadamasa and his era] (Tokyo: Chikuma 

Shobo- , 1993), 118.

 3. Toyama Masakazu, “The Future of Japanese Painting,” Meiji Bijutsukai Daigokai Ho- koku,

June 1890:29–93.

 4. Hayashi Tadamasa, “On Dr. Toyama’s Lecture,” Meiji Bijutsukai Dairokkai Ho- koku, July 

1890:10–31.

 5. James McNeill Whistler, “The Red Rag,” The World, May 22, 1878, reprinted in The 

Gentle Art, 127.

 6. On Whistler’s introduction to the Japanese art world in the Meiji era, see Ayako 

Ono, “Interpretation about Art and Theory of J. McN. Whistler in Japan: From the 

Viewpoint of East and West Exchange—Hayashi Tadamasa, Iwamura Toru and Kume 

Keiichiro,” Studies in Japonisme 30 (2010): 28–44.

 7. “Overseas Bulletin,” Bijutsu shinpo- 2, no. 14 (1903): 7; no. 24 (1904): 7.

 8. Sakai Gisaburo- (Saisui), “Whistler, a Critical Biography (First Part),” Sketch, no. 

5 (1905): 13–16; “Whistler, a Critical Biography (Last Part),” Sketch, no. 6 (1905): 

34–37.

 9. Kyo- nan [Hakutei Ishii], “Words from Ho- sun,” Ho- sun 1, no. 4 (1907): 2.

 10. Kume Keiichiro- , “An Aspect of Whistler’s Life (1),” Ko- fu- , 2nd year, no. 1 (January 

1906): 1–14; “An Aspect of Whistler’s Life (2),” Ko- fu- , 2nd year, no. 2 (March 1906): 

12–22; “An Aspect of Whistler’s Life (3),” Ko- fu- , 2nd year, no. 4 (October 1906): 1–13.

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172 Palaces of Art

 11. Kume Keiichiro- , “An Aspect of Whistler’s Life (2),” 14–15.

 12. Kume Keiichiro- , “An Aspect of Whistler’s Life (2),” 17.

 13. Kume Keiichiro- , “An Aspect of Whistler’s Life (2),” 16–18.

 14. Kume Keiichiro- , “Whistler vs. Ruskin and the Origins of Impressionism,” Seika 2, 

no. 1 (December 1904): 1–20; reprinted in Myo- jo- , Year of the Snake, no. 2 (February 

1905): 48–59.

 15. Myo- jo- 14 (1901): 35.

 16. Hideo Takumi, Modern Japanese Art and Literature: Meiji, Taisho- and Sho- wa Illustrations

(Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1979), 51.

 17. Kinoshita Mokutaro- , “Miduumi to Whisky to-no [Whisteer no E no Kokoro wo],” 

Ho- sun 3, no. 2 (1909): 8. 

 18. Kitahara Hakushu- , “Blue and Gold,” Yomiuri Shinbun, September 18, 1910, p. 6. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Japanese are my own.

 19. Sato- Haruo, “The House of a Spanish Dog,” trans. George Saito, in Modern Japanese 

Stories, ed. Ivan Morris (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1961), 162.

 20. Ishii Hakutei, “History of Art,” Ho- sun 1, no. 4 (n.d.): 2–4; “‘Art,’ the Goddess,” 

Ho- sun 2, no. 1 (1908): 2.

 21. Noda Utarô, Nihon tanbiha bungaku no Tanjô [The birth of literary aestheticism in 

Japan] (Tokyo: Kawade Shobô Shinsha, 1975).

 22. These artists were not only interested in Western art but also in the lifestyle of 

Western artists. The members of the Pan no kai, many in their twenties who never 

had visited Europe, thought that they needed to have a kind of Paris café so that 

artists of various genres could come together and exchange ideas on art. They 

compared the Sumida River to the Seine and gathered at a Western-style restaurant 

beside the river to discuss art.

 23. Kaneko Kentaro, “Bijyutsu to Jisei tono Kankei,” transcribed in Kinko Zattetsu, 1896, 

58–59. Also see Ayako Ono, “Whistler’s Japanese Connections,” in James McNeill 

Whistler in Context: Essays from the Whistler Centenary Symposium, University of Glasgow, 

2003, ed. Lee Glazer, Margaret F. McDonald, Linda Merrill, and Nigel Thorp (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art), 95–104.

WhistlerBook.indb 172 WhistlerBook.indb 172 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Enlisting Aestheticism: 

Beauty, Valor, and the Great War

Linda Merrill

The Palace of Art is a fi gure of speech, a metaphor for the opulent interiors of the 

Victorian age as well as the Aesthetic movement that inspired them. “The Palace 

of Art” is also a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, composed in 1832 and published 

ten years later. The poet himself described it as “a sort of allegory ... of a soul / A sinful 

soul possess’d of many gifts”—in particular, we are given to understand, an artist’s soul. 

“Let the world have peace or wars, / ’T is one to me,” that aesthetic spirit sings, prefi guring the self-indulgent phrases that echo through Whistler’s Ten O’Clock lecture as the 

defi ning quality of Art, “selfi shly occupied with her own perfection only.”1

 For three long 

years and forty stanzas Tennyson’s spirit dwells in “beauty seen / In all varieties of mould 

and mind” until, fi nally, something happens: its overwrought imagination begins to conjure rotting corpses and “white-eyed phantasms, weeping tears of blood,” as its state of 

splendid isolation becomes a punishing solitary confi nement. Casting off its royal robes, 

the sinful soul emphatically repudiates aestheticism, crying, “Make me a cottage in the 

vale, ... where I may mourn and pray.”2 “The Palace of Art,” then, for all its utility to art 

historians, is not a simple paean to Art for Art’s Sake, but an urgent appeal to the artist 

to practice social responsibility.

Tennyson’s allegory anticipates the English Aesthetic movement, followed some 

years later by its American counterpart, and prophesies the demise of that movement, 

which did not take place in the United States until the early decades of the twentieth 

century. The American art establishment clung to its Gilded Age ideals even past the 

revelatory Armory Show of 1913, and when the First World War began, most American 

artists were still refi ning tradition, rather than rebelling against it. Nearly all the artists 

of that older, more conservative generation had trained abroad, and few had altogether 

escaped the infl uence of Whistler, who was a living presence in Paris at the height of the 

American invasion. Indeed, most of those artists can be seen, to some extent, as the 

followers Whistler imagined in the Ten O’Clock, who would work in “the afterglow” of his 

“ephemeral infl uence” and adopt his elitist approach to art.3

 But when the United States 

entered the war in April 1917, the national call to action became insistent enough to penetrate the fortress of art and eventually too compelling for any but the purest aesthetic 

spirit to ignore. Even those who, following Whistler, “had been cynical about sentiment,” 

as Duncan Phillips observed, and “disrespectful about the demands of Mr. and Mrs. Average Person, quickly left their former positions defenseless and put themselves splendidly 

at the service of their governments.”4

Artists began deserting the Palace of Art that November, when George Creel, head 

of the Committee on Public Information—the propaganda wing of the wartime govWhistlerBook.indb 173 WhistlerBook.indb 173 9/9/13 2:3

9/9/13 2:3
174 Palaces of Art

ernment—wrote to the illustrator Charles Dana Gibson recruiting artists to the cause. 

“Art,” Creel declared, “is to be conscripted no less than manhood, and every man and 

woman who puts paint or brush to paper must get the feeling that neither time nor 

energy may be denied when the country calls.”5 In such a climate, the artist could no 

longer remain “by the tents, with the women,” as Whistler had envisaged, while others 

sallied forth to the battlefi eld.6 By January 1918, Gibson—speaking on behalf of American 

artists—was insisting that, on the whole, they were beginning “to be more unselfi sh. 

We are not so grouchy, nor impatient. We can no longer be content with the things and 

conditions we formerly accepted. ... There can be no peace of mind to any artist unless 

he can ... contribute to the country in some way.” By “manfully answering the roll call 

of patriotism,” Gibson asserted, the Tennysonian image of the artist might be dismantled 

to defeat “the foolish fantasy that they were dreamers, with loose hair and still looser 

morals.”7

But what, exactly, was an artist to do? A helpful pamphlet titled Suggestions and 

Information for Artists, Architects, Sculptors, and Those Practicing the Allied Arts Desiring to 

Apply Their Knowledge to War Work was prepared for the Mayor’s Committee on National 

Defense for the City of New York by Albert Eugene Gallatin, whose numerous prewar 

books on Whistler and extensive collection of Whistleriana make his name closely 

intertwined with Whistlerian aestheticism. Indeed, just months before the pamphlet 

appeared, a selection from Gallatin’s collection had been shown in New York to benefi t 

American War Relief, and according to Guy Pène du Bois, who wrote the catalogue’s 

preface, the exhibition “was built about Whistler”: in addition to eighteen works by the 

master himself were portraits of the artist by Thomas Way, William Nicholson, and 

Giovanni Boldini, among others. Speaking about the exhibition “behind the scenes” with 

a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, Gallatin insisted that, in the circumstances, 

purely “academic” painting was “not a man’s work”; he then lapsed into wartime rhetoric 

studded with the watchwords of aestheticism: “There is an urge and a speeding-up to 

win the fi ght against confusion and make the world safe for beauty. The immediate service of art’s allies is to coordinate the forces at their command, to conserve and sort out 

existing material, to bring contentious factions into harmonious rapport.”8 In making the 

world safe for beauty, Gallatin avowed, art could prove “a powerful weapon.”9

Gallatin’s pamphlet outlined the many ways that art might contribute to the war 

effort, beginning with the production of works on a wartime theme—or, as one commentator put it, “appeals to patriotism in line and color.”10 Dozens of American works 

“either directly or indirectly connected with the war” would be shown at the Allied Art 

Salon, an enormous exhibition held just after the Armistice that included paintings by 

such disparate artists as Cecilia Beaux and George Bellows, J. Alden Weir and George 

Luks.11 Many of these had previously been shown in an even more popular, or populist, 

exhibition: the Fifth Avenue Shop Window Display organized by Augustus Vincent Tack 

to benefi t the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive and visited by “the largest public ever invited 

to an art exhibition.”12 (In allowing works to be shown a second time, Gallatin reportedly “acted in the spirit” of Whistler, who, when asked if some of his pictures in an 

exhibition had been seen before, replied, “No, they have been shown, but they haven’t 

been seen.”)13 The exhibit that garnered the most accolades and attention—that was 

“regarded as one of the best war pictures yet painted”—was Edwin Blashfi eld’s Carry On!

(Figure 1), a work so universally affecting that the Metropolitan Museum of Art broke its 

ban on war paintings to acquire this one for the collection (although it was later quietly 

WhistlerBook.indb 174 WhistlerBook.indb 174 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Enlisting Aestheticism 175

deaccessioned and has long since disappeared).14 At nine 

by twelve feet, the work exemplifi es the grandiosity of 

the wartime aesthetic, combining “allegory and realism 

in a splendid manner,” as one contemporary remarked, 

with “a strong appeal to one’s patriotism.”15

Such bold, visually compelling imagery, designed to 

be legible to the multitude even from a distance, held 

tremendous popular appeal, and the pictures naturally 

lent themselves to poster art, an even more explicit 

form of propaganda. As a writer for the Bookman affi rmed, “An artist who ties himself up to a slogan these 

days is doing his bit in the Great War. No submarine, 

no aircraft, can upset an idea once it is safely launched 

in the popular mind by means of a poster.”16 Even the 

world’s most famous American painting became tied 

to a slogan in those days: not an Arrangement in Grey 

and Black, but Whistler’s Mother was enlisted to enjoin 

young Irish Canadians to join the fi ght overseas (Figure 

2) and aging British citizens to purchase war bonds for 

their twilight years (Figure 3). In this “renaissance of 

the poster,” Gallatin explained, art was restored to its 

status in the Middle Ages, when it was “the property of 

the people, as it should be, and not ticketed specimens 

in a tomblike museum.”17

There were other ways artists could do their 

part for the war effort, such as organizing and staffi ng 

American camoufl age units; painting “typical French 

rural scenery” to be used as “designation targets,” or 

range fi ngers, in training artillery offi cers; or supervising the decorations, banners, and costumes used in 

extravagantly staged parades down Fifth Avenue.18 The 

contribution that artists made in the fi eld of interior 

decoration is one aspect of their participation that has 

dwindled to less than a footnote in the larger story of 

American art during the Great War, but as the New York 

Times reported, many artists too old to enlist but eager 

“to play some part in the vast drama of the war” seized 

“the opportunity afforded by the various rest houses 

and Y.M.C.A. huts to reach the minds and feelings of the 

soldiers.”19 Constructed and operated for the American 

Expeditionary Forces, those buildings were meant to 

promote “that indefi nable force known as morale.”20

They stood in for the schools, clubs, churches, and 

especially the homes that citizen-soldiers left behind 

and—it was hoped—would not only counteract the 

brutalization they were certain to face at the front but 

mitigate that natural tendency of young men, when away 

FIGURE 1. Edwin Howland Blashfi eld, Carry On!, 

1918. Present location unknown; reproduced from 

John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood, Winning 

a Cause: World War One Stories (Boston: Silver, Burdett, 1919), frontispiece.

FIGURE 2. Hal Ross Perrigard, after Whistler, “Fight 

for Her: Come with the Irish Canadian Rangers 

Overseas Battalion, Montreal,” printed by the Harris 

Lithographing Co., Toronto, ca. 1915. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, WWI Posters, 

LC-USZC4-12703.

WhistlerBook.indb 175 WhistlerBook.indb 175 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
176 Palaces of Art

from the refi ning infl uence of women, to fall into 

profane speech and vulgar behavior. 21 Although 

ever so humble, the huts were designed as bastions of civilization. 

Because most were hastily built structures 

intended to be temporary, none of the four 

thousand or so YMCA structures has survived. 

Nevertheless, their importance to the record 

of artistic activity in World War I is signifi cant 

because American artists, as engineers and experts, helped to develop this novel form of public building—a substitute domestic space that 

introduced the concept of the House Beautiful 

into military life. The “hut,” then, makes a fi tting 

twentieth-century counterpoint to the nineteenth-century “palace,” from which many of 

the artist-decorators emerged. As in the poem, 

the palace and the hut (there the “cottage in the 

vale”) were divergent in design and intention yet 

harmonically interdependent. 

The best documented of the YMCA 

buildings was the American Eagle Hut in New 

York City, which stood at the Sixth Avenue 

corner of Bryant Park—“a jaunty green building with a wide veranda and a boutonnière of 

pink geraniums,” from which the surrounding 

skyscrapers appeared “to draw back politely, 

to give it room” (Figure 4).22 Constructed 

to accommodate the legions of soldiers who 

passed through the city on their way to the 

front and who required a place to read the 

newspaper, write a letter home, or organize a night at the theater, the Eagle Hut was 

entirely planned, implemented, and “manned,” as it were, by a committee of socially 

prominent New York ladies, including Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Jay Gould, 

who recruited from their ranks some eight hundred volunteers.23 That an ordinary 

foot soldier might be served a cup of coffee by one of the richest women in America 

seemed to confi rm the democratizing principle of the huts, which were open to soldiers and offi cers alike.24 It also meant that the Eagle Hut represented only the highest 

standards of decorum and decoration, accounting, at least in part, for its reputation as 

the “most attractive Y.M.C.A. in the world.”25 These particular volunteers would stand 

for nothing less: after all, many of them occupied the opulent mansions lining Fifth Avenue, practically in sight of Bryant Park.

The fi nest of those houses boasted interiors designed and furnished by Herter 

Brothers, the premier decorating fi rm of the American Aesthetic movement. Christian 

Herter, principal in the fi rm, was “a pioneer in better taste,” as his son made known, “in 

an era when ... the rich ‘forty-niners’ and bankers entrusted him with their aesthetic 

education, and he chose for them their paintings, their Chinese porcelain, their Persian 

FIGURE 3. “Old Age Must Come: So Prepare for it by Investing 

in War Savings Certifi cates,” ca. 1917, published by National 

War Savings Committee, London, printed by Eyre & Spottiswoode. Ball State University Libraries, Archives and Special 

Collections, Elisabeth Ball Collection, Muncie, Indiana.

WhistlerBook.indb 176 WhistlerBook.indb 176 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Enlisting Aestheticism 177

pottery and altogether furnished the lavish houses he built for them”—houses that, 

from this description, sound very much like the palace inhabited by Tennyson’s artistic 

soul.26 The most extravagant of the Herter Brothers houses was the William H. Vanderbilt mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue, reputed to possess the costliest furnishings and 

decorations of any house in America.27 Though a bit grander (as might be expected from 

an American millionaire), the Vanderbilt house may be compared to the palatial London 

home of Frederick Richards Leyland at 49 Prince’s Gate, decorated only a few years earlier by Richard Norman Shaw, Thomas Jeckyll, and James McNeill Whistler. Both houses 

were showcases for priceless works of art, voluminous collections of precious objects, 

and rare antique materials, and both featured rooms specially designed to display their 

owners’ East Asian treasures. 

Vanderbilt’s so-called Japanese Parlor (Figure 5) was, according to the writer Earl 

Shinn, “so furnished and appointed as to give the valuables contained in it their most 

becoming setting”—a strategy consistent with the aestheticist dictate that every work of 

art be appropriately framed and displayed. To accommodate Vanderbilt’s assemblage of 

Asian art—lacquer ware, cloisonné, bronzes, and ceramics—Christian Herter fashioned 

an elaborate framework that encompassed the room, with shelves rising at various 

heights to hold objects of different dimensions, in “the labyrinthine fashion,” Shinn explained, “of an Oriental étagère.”28 In a similar fashion, Jeckyll’s intricately carved lattice 

of shelving framed Leyland’s prized collection of Chinese blue-and-white (see Deusner, 

Figure 4, and Huxtable, Figure 1). As in the Vanderbilt room (where “almost every surFIGURE 4. American Eagle Hut in Bryant Park, Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, New York City, ca. 1918. 

University of Minnesota Libraries, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, Minneapolis.

WhistlerBook.indb 177 WhistlerBook.indb 177 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
178 Palaces of Art

face is covered, one might say weighted, with ornament”), plates and pots once crowded every spindled 

shelf of the Peacock Room, creating Victorian magnifi -

cence at the expense of Japanese serenity.29

By the time of the First World War, the children 

of the Vanderbilt–Herter Brothers generation were 

rebelling against the excesses of Victorian taste, 

particularly the exoticism and eclecticism of the 

Aesthetic movement. The celebrated decorator Elsie 

de Wolfe, for example, related in her memoirs an 

anecdote that encapsulates the shift from Victorian 

superfl uity to modernist restraint. She recalls the 

“acute and signifi cant hour” when the drawing room 

of her childhood home was “done over” with wallpaper in a William Morris design: seeing the remodeled 

walls for the fi rst time, Elsie “caught her breath,” and 

“jumping up and down, ... cried out, over and over, 

‘It’s so ugly! It’s so ugly!’” In de Wolfe’s ideal interior, 

in contrast, “the colors were blended in a gentle 

camaraderie and ... the graceful furniture invited 

repose and comfort.” Such a room, she said, “created 

a kind of peace in me, and made me feel at home.”30

The New York Times considered the Vanderbilt mansion to be “replete with everything 

that contributes to the comfort of a real home,” but not everyone thought so: Vanderbilt’s daughter-in-law Alice, whose husband inherited the house in 1885, referred to it as 

“the Black Hole of Calcutta” and had it entirely redecorated in 1915—a fate the Peacock 

Room had narrowly escaped at the hands of Blanche Watney.31

In this era, then, the model of comfort was not the Fifth Avenue mansion of a 

Vanderbilt but something akin to a YMCA rest hut, which was generally considered “the 

connecting link between the soldiers and their homes.” Indeed, one critical function of 

the huts was to alleviate homesickness, which some regarded as “the worst hardship of 

war.”32 The conviction that a homely interior might impart a restorative infl uence underlies the design reforms of the Progressive Era and validates the virtues of aestheticist refi nement. The color theories that had inspired artistic experimentation in the nineteenth 

century were employed in the twentieth as principles of interior design, with color 

harmonies serving not only aesthetic but also psychological and emotional purposes. 

According to Emily Burbank of House and Garden, it was discovered almost by accident 

that “whitewash and gay paints applied inside canteens and rest huts acted as a tonic on 

the jaded senses of men coming out of a region of smoke and dun-colored earth. Color! 

Color! It was color that they craved.”33 The American sculptor Janet Scudder, who volunteered in France, recalled her fi rst sight of the undecorated foyers du soldat, “plain, dismal, 

bare, mud-splashed structures that were depressing beyond words,” and her determination to enhance them “with colors that suggested sunny days and cheerful times.”34 Such 

experiments demonstrated “the value of this art even under fi re,” Burbank said, and as a 

result, the decorative schemes of the YMCA huts relied on a palette of “nerve-soothing, 

eye-resting blues and greens,” with the occasional note of orange or red to add a touch 

“of stimulus and cheer.”35

FIGURE 5. Japanese Parlor (northwest corner) in the 

William H. Vanderbilt House, New York, ca. 1882. Drawn 

by [Martin] Thurwanger, printed by Lemercier. From 

Edward Strahan [Earl Shinn], Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and 

Collection, vol. 3 (New York: George Barrie, 1883–84), 

following p. 64.

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Enlisting Aestheticism 179

The purely aesthetic dimension of the decoration 

was never neglected, however. In fact, the very fi rst 

consideration in planning out the color scheme was 

to harmonize “the pine wood of the structures, the 

olive drab of the uniforms, and the red, white, and 

blue of the fl ags.”36 The Eagle Hut in Bryant Park was 

exemplary in this regard; signifi cantly, the “experts” in 

charge of its decoration were the artists Adele McGinnis Herter and her husband, Albert—a son of Christian Herter of Herter Brothers’ fame. Both Albert and 

Adele Herter were artists of prodigious gifts; they may 

also have been the model aesthetes of their generation. Albert Herter manifested his early allegiance to 

Whistlerian aesthetics in 1892 with Portrait of Bessie

(Figure 6), a painting that gracefully confl ates the pose 

of Whistler’s Mother with the props and color scheme 

of The White Girl (see Siewert, Figure 5).37 He and 

Adele spent the fi rst year of their marriage in Japan, 

where both worked prolifi cally in watercolor, then 

settled in Paris, where they even enjoyed a brief spell 

at Whistler’s Académie Carmen; in fact, Albert and 

Adele were the only students that Frederick MacMonnies could later recall having taught there.38

According to Grace Wickham Curran, who knew 

them well, the Herters were “both intensely artistic, 

with tastes, sympathies and aspirations so harmonious 

that wherever they are they create an environment of 

beauty.” Indeed, their own house in East Hampton, Près 

Choisis on Georgica Pond, was said to be “one of the 

fi nest examples of a color plan in our architecture.”39

The gardens, Adele’s particular purview, formed an everchanging frame for the house, a harmonious extension of its refi ned interiors: outside 

one room decorated in blue and white, for example, bloomed a bed of purple iris and 

Madonna lilies.40 Albert Herter’s interiors appear for their time remarkably understated, 

and they were accordingly extolled for their “restfulness” rather than their opulence—

or, as the Ladies’ Home Journal phrased it in 1902, “the artistic not carried beyond the 

line of comfort.” The Eagle Hut was considered a “remarkably successful example” of the 

Herters’ “method,” manifesting the same concern with balancing creature comforts and 

color harmonies.41 

The Herters’ reputation as decorators rested upon their instinctive ability to create 

spaces people truly wanted to inhabit: as one visitor to the Eagle Hut from Ohio observed, “You look in vain for the sickly drabs and bored browns that you have come to 

expect in any public building. Instead, you fi nd tea tables of a cheerful green, irregularly 

placed ... [and] chairs that so far forget their public character as to be really comfortable to sit in.” Adele Herter, who seems to have been in charge of the YMCA project, 

is said to have “enlisted a number of prominent artists in the ranks of her workers” and 

“made them observe what she calls the psychology of color in the work.”42 Because her 

FIGURE 6. Albert Herter, Portrait of Bessie, 1892. Oil 

on canvas, 149.86 × 81.28 cm. Courtesy High Museum 

of Art, Atlanta. Purchased with funds from the Margaret and Terry Stent Endowment for the Acquisition of 

American Art and High Museum of Art Enhancement 

Fund, 2000.162.

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180 Palaces of Art

object was “dashing inexpensive cheer,” sunny yellow curtains hung in the windows, and 

the lamps were covered with parchment-paper shades rimmed with a “broad band of 

orange.”43 The sturdy, cotton ticking wall hangings had been dyed with natural pigments 

provided by Albert Herter’s own decorating enterprise, the Herter Looms, and the 

furnishings were intentionally modest and necessarily durable. Windsor or willow chairs 

(“with a ten-year guarantee”), even common kitchen chairs, were “made charming” with 

stains, rather than paint, adhering to Whistler’s principle “of letting the ground on which 

pigment is used bear its share of the effect.”44 Even in 1918, Whistler was regarded as 

“the greatest master of taste of the Nineteenth Century,”45 and his philosophy was much 

in evidence in the Eagle Hut (Figure 7), where simple pottery vases held gladioli in colors 

complementing the furnishings. 

The color scheme was drawn from the keynote work, Albert Herter’s painting of a 

knight on horseback, which hung above the bricked hearth of this makeshift home. The 

“steel blue” of the armor, combined with the “fl ame color and white” of the banner, 

hinted at “American colors,” even though the knight himself was indisputably French.46

His motto, Sans peur et sans reproche (Without Fear and Without Hate), is inscribed 

below the image, identifying him as Pierre Terrail Le Vieux, seigneur de Bayard (1473–

1524)—the fearless, faultless soldier considered to epitomize the ideals of chivalry and 

reputedly the last of the knights in shining armor. As the New York Times explained, Herter’s portrait of the Chevalier Bayard embodied the artist’s “conception of the modern 

crusader.”47

If the analogy of modern American soldiers with medieval crusaders seems an odd 

appropriation of European mythic history, it was nonetheless deeply engrained in American war rhetoric. The fi rst fi lm released by the Committee on Public Information, for 

FIGURE 7. American Eagle (YMCA) Hut in Bryant Park, New York City, 1918, interior, showing Chevalier Bayard

(1918) by Albert Herter (1871–1950), present location unknown. Published by Bain News Service. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, George Grantham Bain Collection, LC-B2-4616-10.

WhistlerBook.indb 180 WhistlerBook.indb 180 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Enlisting Aestheticism 181

instance, was titled Pershing’s Crusaders; the publicity 

poster echoes Herter’s picture, with General John J. 

Pershing riding stoically into battle with the ghostly 

fi gures of white knights protectively beside him (Figure 

8). Herter himself returned to the theme in a tapestry 

made for George G. Booth of Detroit (Figure 9), the 

founder of the Cranbrook Academy, and the story 

of its commission illuminates the transformation of 

aesthetic ideology in the war years. Originally, Booth 

proposed a tapestry on the general theme of “the 

Arts and Crafts”: “It would have no deep subject 

to be depicted, and it would offer to the artist the 

maximum range in the selection of color, composition, 

and the personages necessary to the composition.” 

The tapestry, in other words, would be woven around 

the principle of Art for Art’s Sake. But this was the 

summer of 1918, and when Herter politely replied that 

the proposed topic seemed “somewhat remote from 

the spirit of the times,” Booth supplied an alternative, pointing out the “similarity between the present 

day conditions as compared with the period of the 

Crusades.”48 The resulting image, as described in the 

American Magazine of Art, is crowded with “old-world 

dignitaries” who “stand to greet the Great Crusade 

coming out of the west”: “The central fi gure of an 

American soldier exemplifi es in his bearing and his 

countenance the very spirit of the Great Republic 

devoted to a noble cause, approaching his stern duty 

without fear and without hate”—the motto, we recall, of the Chevalier Bayard.49

Herter only hinted at a personal motivation for 

rendering the subject of Booth’s tapestry more relevant to present-day concerns. “Like many of us,” he 

had written to his patron, “the war has come very 

forcibly home to me.”50 In fact, the Herters’ eldest 

son had died at Belleau Wood only a few weeks 

earlier. Everit Herter, an artist like his parents, had 

been the fi rst volunteer accepted into the American 

Camoufl age Corps; sadly, he became the fi rst of 

the American camoufl eurs to give his life in France.51

Word of his death came within days of the celebratory dedication of the Eagle Hut, where Albert Herter’s Chevalier Bayard idealized and aestheticized the 

American soldier. Although that painting does not 

survive, a posthumous portrait of Everit in armor 

(Figure 10) suggests that Albert Herter’s conception 

of the noble crusader shifted, with his son’s death, 

FIGURE 8. U.S. Army, publicity poster for Pershings Crusaders, “The First Offi cial American War Picture, Taken 

by the U.S. Signal Corps and Naval Photographers,” 

1918. University of North Texas Digital Library, http://

digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc377/. 

FIGURE 9. The Great Crusade, 1920, tapestry designed 

by Albert Herter, woven by Jean-Baptiste Boule, the 

Herter Looms. Collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, 

Bloomfi eld Hills, Michigan. Gift of George Gough Booth 

and Ellen Scripps Booth. Photograph by R. H. Hensleigh 

and Tim Thayer. 

WhistlerBook.indb 181 WhistlerBook.indb 181 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
182 Palaces of Art

from the historical to the particular.

As the centerpiece of the YMCA hut, 

the Chevalier Bayard dutifully carried on. 

The ostensible purpose of the painting was 

to inspire the troops with valor as they 

headed overseas. But would the American 

soldiers who passed through the Eagle Hut 

grasp the meaning of Herter’s French knight 

or connect him with their own wartime 

enterprise? The New York Times conceded 

that the audience for the painting would 

comprise a spectrum of sensibilities, from 

scholars who knew more about the legends 

of chivalry than the artist who painted them 

to “men as nearly illiterate as one may be 

and call himself an American.” Besides the 

esoteric theme, there was the academic 

style of the painting to consider since the 

soldiery undoubtedly included that “disheartening class ... who have been all their lives in bondage to quick and cheap methods 

and garish pleasures.” For those men especially, whose lives might otherwise never be 

touched by good art or interior design, Herter’s inspirational painting, installed in a 

modestly elegant interior, might exercise a therapeutic effect: “A wide fi eld of infl uence 

opens for an art that can fi nd its place in the war, not only as an instrument of effi ciency, 

but as a refi ning and soothing infl uence for the human spirit under conditions imposing 

incredible strain and excitement.” That infl uence, of course, could be translated into the 

longer-term objective that matched the mandate of the American Aesthetic movement: 

the elevation of the nation’s taste. As the Times concluded, “Simple as this method of 

bringing art into the lives of the soldiers may seem, it hardly can fail to have permanent 

results that will be of importance after the war is over and the men return to their 

homes.”52

So it was that the lowly hut, rather than the luxurious palace, attracted the attention 

of artists during the Great War, impelling them to depart their rarefi ed existence and 

commit the offense, as Whistler would see it, of confounding Beauty with Virtue. Yet 

the end of the war, and the end of the Aesthetic movement, did not, as some expected, 

restore art to its early function of educating and enlightening the masses. Instead, as the 

art historian Milton Brown pointed out decades ago, art in the wake of the war “sought 

forgetfulness by burying itself more deeply in formal problems.”53 A. E. Gallatin again 

provides a salient example: his move toward European modernism from the aestheticist 

taste for Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley culminated in 1927 with his Museum of Living 

Art, which held iconic works by Picasso, Léger, and Miró. Indeed, the triumph of modernism in the interwar years represents the second reversal that Tennyson’s “Palace of 

Art” foretold, another retreat from responsibility. “Yet pull not down my palace towers, 

that are / So lightly, beautifully built,” the recovering spirit earnestly entreats, implying 

its ambivalence about aestheticism: “Perchance I may return with others there / When I 

have purged my guilt.” 

FIGURE 10. Albert Herter, Portrait of the Artist’s Son 

(Everit A. Herter), 1918. Collection of Frederick R. Koch. 

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Enlisting Aestheticism 183

Notes

 1. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 8.

 2. Alfred Tennyson, The Palace of Art, and Other Poems, ed. Edna Henry Lee Turpin 

(New York, 1898), http://openlibrary.org.

 3. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 27.

 4. Duncan Phillips, “The Allied War Salon,” American Magazine of Art 10, no. 4 (February 1919): 117.

 5. Creel to C. D. Gibson, November 8, 1917, quoted in Eric Van Schaak, “The Division 

of Pictorial Publicity in World War I,” Design Issues 22, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 34.

 6. Whistler, Ten O’Clock, 11.

 7. Charles Dana Gibson, program for a gala victory dinner for the artists of the Division of Pictorial Publicity, February 14, 1919, Hotel Commodore, New York, quoted 

in von Schaak, “Division of Pictorial Publicity,” 44–45.

 8. Pène du Bois, quoted in “Behind the Scenes with A. E. Gallatin,” Christian Science 

Monitor, January 14, 1918, ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The exhibition of 

portraits of Whistler was held at the Bourgeois Galleries, New York, January 3 to 

February 2, 1918.

 9. Albert Eugene Gallatin, Art and the Great War (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1919), 21.

 10. Lambert St. Clair, The Story of the Liberty Loans: Being a Record of the Volunteer Liberty 

Loan Army, Its Personnel, Mobilization and Methods: How America at Home Backed Her 

Armies and Allies in the World War (Washington, DC: James William Bryan Press, 1919), 

14.

 11. “Allied War Salon Opens,” New York Times, December 10, 1918, ProQuest Historical 

Newspapers.

 12. “‘Avenue of the Allies’ Is an Art Exhibit,” New York Times, October 6, 1918, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

 13. “Allied War Salon Opens.”

 14. “Exhibitions for December: Edwin H. Blashfi eld,” Bulletin of the Detroit Museum of Art

13, no. 2 (December 1918): 11. Acquired in 1918, Carry On! was later deaccessioned 

and sold through Plaza Art Galleries on June 5, 1956. James Moske, managing archivist, Metropolitan Museum, e-mail message to author, July 12, 2011.

 15. “Exhibitions for December.” See also “‘Avenue of the Allies’ Is an Art Exhibit.” 

 16. J. Moses Montrose, “Brushes, Attention! An Account of the American Artists’ War 

Work and a Sprightly Meditation upon the Return of First-Rate Art to the Subject of 

War,” Bookman 47, no. 5 (July 1918): 503.

 17. Gallatin, Art and the Great War, 36.

 18. Gallatin, Art and the Great War, 47; Ilene Susan Fort, The Flag Paintings of Childe Hassam (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Harry N. 

Abrams, 1988), 13–14.

 19. “Decoration for Y.M.C.A. Huts: Art at Home and Abroad,” New York Times, September 15, 1918, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

WhistlerBook.indb 183 WhistlerBook.indb 183 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
184 Palaces of Art

 20. International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, National War 

Work Council, Summary of World War Work of the American Y.M.C.A. (New York: 

International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, 1920), 119.

 21. The International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, Summary of 

World War Work, 120; William H. Taft, Service with Fighting Men: An Account of the 

Work of the American Young Men’s Christian Associations in the World War (New York: 

International Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association, 1922), 85.

22. “Open Y.M.C.A. Hut in Bryant Park. Formal Presentation Will Take Place Today 

with Dedication and Flag-Raising Exercises,” New York Times, June 9, 1918, ProQuest 

Historical Newspapers; Blanche Brace, “Y.M.C.A. Hut Nestling in Bryant Park 

Solves the Question of Where to Go While in New York—It’s Only for Soldiers and 

Sailors,” Columbus Daily Enquirer (Georgia), August 2, 1918, 8, NewsBank/Readex, 

America’s Historical Newspapers.

 23. “The Bryant Park Eagle Hut and Brother Alvin E. Gillett,” Delta [Sigma Nu Fraternity: A National Society of College Men] 36, no. 1 (October 1918): n.p.

 24. “When the Waitress is Worth a Million,” Tucson Daily Citizen, July 5, 1918, 6.

 25. “Bryant Park Eagle Hut,” n.p.

 26. Albert Herter, A Dubious Lineage: Short Stories by Albert Herter (1871–1950), ed. Harriet Conel Herter and Caroline Ames Herter (San Francisco: HerterStudio, 1998), 

31.

 27. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, “Christian Herter’s Decoration of the William H. Vanderbilt House in New York City,” Magazine Antiques 147, no. 3 (March 1995): 408, 

ProQuest Research Library.

 28. Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, vol. 3 (New York: George Barrie, 

1883–84), 61–62.

 29. Artistic Houses: Being a Series of Interior Views of a Number of the Most Beautiful and 

Celebrated Homes in the United States with A Description of the Art Treasures Contained 

Therein (New York, 1883; repr., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), 1:113. See also 

Marilynn Johnson Bordes, “Christian Herter and the Cult of Japan,” Record of the Art 

Museum, Princeton University 34, no. 2 (1975): 20–27.

 30. Elsie De Wolfe, After All (1935; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1974), 1–3, 48.

 31. “The Vanderbilt Palaces,” New York Times, August 25, 1881, ProQuest Historical 

Newspapers; Frelinghuysen, “Christian Herter’s Decoration,” 408. On Watney and 

the Peacock Room, see Linda Merrill, The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1998), 314–15.

 32. International Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations, Summary of World 

War Work, 120; John W. Pontius, “Y Work in London,” Norwester 2, no. 3 (January 

1919): 15.

 33. Emily Burbank, “Interior Decorations That Soldiers Like,” House and Garden, December 1918, 26.

 34. Janet Scudder, Modeling My Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 276.

 35. Burbank, “Interior Decorations,” 62.

 36. “Decoration for Y.M.C.A. Huts.”

WhistlerBook.indb 184 WhistlerBook.indb 184 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Enlisting Aestheticism 185

 37. See Linda Merrill, ed., After Whistler: The Artist and His Infl uence on American Painting 

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the High Museum of Art, 

2004), 200–201.

 38. Interview with Frederick MacMonnies, February 15, 1927, in “Interviews of Artists 

and Architects Associated with the National Academy of Design, 1926–1927,” p. 33, 

DeWitt Lockman Collection, New-York Historical Society, lent to the Archives of 

American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, microfi lm 503, frame 945.

 39. Grace Wickham Curran, “The Herter Memorial,” American Magazine of Art 18 (June 

1927): 299; Ruby Ross Goodnow and Rayne Adams, The Honest House (New York: 

Century, 1914), 58.

 40. Patsy Southgate, “The Herters: Lavish Legacy,” East Hampton Star, May 1989, quoting 

from an unidentifi ed article in Antiques.

 41. “Inside of a Hundred Suburban Homes,” Ladies’ Home Journal 19, no. 11 (October 

1902): 28, American Periodicals Series Online; “Decoration for Y.M.C.A. Huts.”

 42. Brace, “Y.M.C.A. Hut.”

 43. Burbank, “Interior Decorations,” 58.

 44. “Decoration for Y.M.C.A. Huts.”

 45. Q.R., “Nineteenth Century Landscape Painting,” Christian Science Monitor, September 

30, 1918, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

 46. “Decoration for Y.M.C.A. Huts.”

 47. “Open Y.M.C.A. Hut.”

 48. George G. Booth to Albert Herter, August 30, 1918, and Herter to Booth, August 

22, 1918, George G. Booth Papers (1981-01), Cranbrook Archives, Bloomfi eld Hills, 

MI. I give sincere thanks to Robbie Terman of the Cranbrook Archives.

 49. “The Great Crusade—A Unique War Memorial, American Magazine of Art 12 (February 1921): 58–59.

 50. Herter to Booth, August 22, 1918, Cranbrook Archives.

 51. “New York Artist Killed in France,” New York Times, June 28, 1918, ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

 52. “Decoration for Y.M.C.A. Huts.”

 53. Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955), 76.

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ContributorsWhistlerBook.indb 198 WhistlerBook.indb 198 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Caroline Arscott is head of research and professor of nineteenth-century British art 

at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she has lectured since 1988. She 

was a member of the editorial board of the Oxford Art Journal from 1998 to 2008. 

She is also a UK editor of the international RIHA Journal (Research Institutes in the 

History of Art). She has been a visiting scholar at the Yale Center for British Art in 

New Haven and at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2011, she was the Sarah 

Cutts Frerichs Lecturer in Victorian Studies at Brown University and she presented 

the 2013 Allen R. Hite Memorial Lecture at the University of Louisville. She has 

published on William Holman Hunt, Millais, Leighton, Poynter, Sickert, Tissot, Fildes, 

Frith, and Whistler, and is the author of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: 

Interlacings (2008), which discusses Morris’s design and Burne-Jones’s mythological 

painting in relation to the armaments industry and other Victorian technologies.

Susan P. Casteras is professor and chair of art history at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her undergraduate degrees from Vassar College and her 

doctorate from Yale University. She is the author of more than seventy-fi ve books, 

articles, essays, and reviews on Victorian art, especially Pre-Raphaelitism and its 

main artists and issues. For many years she served as curator of paintings at the 

Yale Center for British Art, where she organized numerous exhibitions on Victorian 

painting. Currently, she is working on a long-term project on Victorian religious 

painting and another on the commodifi cation of Pre-Raphaelitism from 1975 to 

the present. A past Fulbright Distinguished American Scholars Program fellowship 

enabled her to study and speak in New Zealand, and she has lectured extensively in 

numerous academic symposia and conferences as well as at the National Gallery, the 

Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Julie Codell is professor of art history at Arizona State University in Tempe and has 

published widely on Victorian art and literature, on colonial India, especially Indian 

craft production, and on fi lm. She wrote The Victorian Artist (2003; 2012) and Images 

of an Idyllic Past: Edward Curtis’s Photographs (1988); edited Transculturation in British 

Art, 1770–1930 (2012), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (2012), The 

Political Economy of Art (2008), Genre, Gender, Race, World Cinema (2007), and Imperial 

Co-Histories (2003); and coedited Encounters in the Victorian Press with Laurel Brake 

(2004) and Orientalism Transposed with Dianne Macleod (1998), which is now being 

translated into Japanese (2014).

Melody Barnett Deusner is assistant professor of art history at Indiana University, Bloomington. She specializes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century 

art, with particular emphasis on the study of American art and mass culture in an 

international context. She received her doctorate from the University of Delaware 

and is currently completing a book titled A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting 

and its Patrons in England and America. Her broader research interests include the 

visual culture of communities in the nineteenth century, the international reception 

of American art, and the evolution (and intersection) of private, corporate, and 

WhistlerBook.indb 199 WhistlerBook.indb 199 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
200 Palaces of Art

museum collections in the United States. Her scholarship has been sponsored by the 

Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the 

Luce Foundation/ACLS, the Kress Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ruth Fine was a curator for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, from 

1972 through 2012. Her research on Whistler dates to the 1970s when she was 

curator of Alverthorpe Gallery, home of Lessing J. Rosenwald’s prints and drawings 

now at the National Gallery. She wrote the catalogue documenting the etchings 

by Whistler assembled by Julius and Anita Zelman, edited James McNeill Whistler: 

A Reexamination (Studies in the History of Art 19), contributed to the catalogue for 

the 1995 Whistler exhibition in London and Washington, and advised on the online 

catalogue of Whistler’s etchings. Among her other monographic exhibitions and 

catalogues are those that address the art of John Marin (one of Whistler’s early 

enthusiasts), Romare Bearden, Mel Bochner, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, 

and Georgia O’Keeffe. Fine serves on the boards of the Terra Foundation for 

American Art, the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and the Fabric Workshop and Museum. 

Lee Glazer is associate curator of American art at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of 

Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. She recently reinstalled the Peacock Room to its 

appearance in 1908 and wrote the accompanying book, The Peacock Room Comes to 

America (2012). Since coming to the Freer and Sackler in 2007, she has reinstalled the 

museum’s American galleries and organized a series of thematic exhibitions, including watercolors by Winslow Homer, seascapes by American artist Dwight Tryon 

and Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, and nocturnes on paper by Whistler. 

She coedited James McNeill Whistler in Context (2008) and East West Interchanges in 

American Art (2012), and she was the project director for “The Story of the Beautiful: 

Freer, Whistler, and Their Points of Contact,” an interactive Web resource created 

with colleagues at Wayne State University that launched in 2013. 

Imogen Hart is a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. She has 

taught courses in the history of art departments at the University of Bristol, the 

University of Birmingham, and Yale University. She is the author of Arts and Crafts 

Objects (2010) and coeditor, with Jason Edwards, of Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–

1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts (2010). Other publications include chapters on 

William Morris in The Cambridge Companion to the Pre-Raphaelites (2012) and William 

Morris and the Art of Everyday Life (2010) and on Arts and Crafts magazines in The 

Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009). More recently, 

she contributed an essay on Edwardian history painting to the center’s publication 

Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2013).

Erica E. Hirshler is an expert in American painting of the late nineteenth and early 

twentieth century and a senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She 

is particularly interested in issues of national identity and the artistic exchange 

between the United States and Europe. She also studies patronage and collecting, 

women artists, and Boston art and history. She holds a BA from Wellesley College 

and a PhD from Boston University. Her most recent book is Sargent’s Daughters: 

The Biography of a Painting, which illuminates Sargent’s masterpiece The Daughters of 

Edward Darley Boit. She organized and wrote the accompanying books for the popular 

exhibitions A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940 (2001) and Dennis 

Miller Bunker: American Impressionist (1995), and she has contributed to several other 

important shows, among them, The Lure of Italy (1992), John Singleton Copley (1995), 

Mary Cassatt (1998), John Singer Sargent (1998), Edmund Tarbell (2001), Childe Hassam 

WhistlerBook.indb 200 WhistlerBook.indb 200 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Contributors 201

(2004), Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting (2005), Americans in Paris, 

1860–1900 (2006), Sargent and the Sea (2009), and John Singer Sargent Watercolors

(2013).

Sally-Anne Huxtable is the principal curator of modern and contemporary design 

at National Museums Scotland, and a member of the board of trustees of the Design 

History Society. Previously, she worked as a lecturer in art and design history at 

Northumbria University and was the research associate for the 2010 exhibition and 

catalogue Gustav Stickley and American Arts and Crafts at the Dallas Museum of Art. 

In 2011 she gained her doctorate from the University of Bristol, where she also 

lectured in the history of art. Her publications include contributions to exhibition 

and collections catalogues for the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Museo Nacional 

del Prado, Dallas Museum of Art, and Yale University Press. She also coauthored and 

edited the British catalogue for the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico (2013). 

Huxtable is currently completing Aestheticism and Its Interiors 1848–1900, to be published by Ashgate in 2014.

Margaret R. Laster is an art historian who specializes in the study of nineteenth-century art and material culture, with a particular emphasis on transatlantic histories of 

collecting and patronage. She has served as Research Fellow for Provenance at the 

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and performed similar research at the Art Institute of 

Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum. The recipient of an MA from the University of 

Chicago, and a doctorate from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, 

she has been awarded fellowships from the City University of New York, the Huntington Library and Art Collections, the William Morris Society, the Frick Collection 

and Frick Art Reference Library, and the Smithsonian Institution. She was a Leon 

Levy Fellow at the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting in 2012. In 2011, she 

completed a 13-month term as the inaugural fellow of the Lunder Consortium for 

Whistler Studies at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, where 

she collaborated with consortium partners to create their fi rst international symposium, from which this book developed.

Margaret F. MacDonald is professor emerita of art history at the University of 

Glasgow and a specialist in nineteenth-century art, particularly the life and work 

of James McNeill Whistler. She is author, coauthor, or editor of numerous publications on Whistler, including catalogues raisonnés of his oils (1880) and works on 

paper (1995), Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice (2001), Whistler, Women, and 

Fashion (2003), and American Icon: The Painting of Whistler’s Mother (2003). She was 

the coeditor of the online edition of Whistler’s correspondence and the cocurator of a number of exhibitions on Whistler and his circle, including those at the 

Rijksmuseum (1987), the Tate Gallery, Musée d’Orsay, and the National Gallery in 

Washington, DC (1994–95), the Frick Collection (2003), IVAM Valencia (2005), and 

the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (2007–08). She is the director of the Whistler 

Etchings Project, an online catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s etchings that launched 

in 2011. Her most recent project is cocurating An American in London: Whistler and 

the Thames, an exhibition co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, the 

Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.

Linda Merrill is a lecturer in the department of art history at Emory University in 

Atlanta. She was the curator of American art at the Freer Gallery of Art from 1986 

through 1998, and more recently, she served as the Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She has published several 

books on Whistler and his contemporaries, including The Peacock Room: A Cultural 

WhistlerBook.indb 201 WhistlerBook.indb 201 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
202 Palaces of Art

Biography (1998), A Pot of Paint: Aestheticism on Trial in Whistler v. Ruskin (1993), and 

An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art (1990). In 

2003 she organized the exhibition After Whistler: The Artist and His Infl uence on American Painting for the High Museum and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She received her 

BA in English from Smith College and PhD in the history of art from the University 

of London, where she studied on a Marshall Scholarship.

Ayako Ono teaches art history at Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan, and serves 

as a visiting lecturer at Nagano Prefectural College. She received her master’s and 

doctoral degrees from the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include 

cross-cultural exchange between the West and Japan, especially concerning Japanese 

infl uence on Western art in the nineteenth century. Her current research focuses on 

Whistler and his introduction in Japan. She is the author of Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and Nineteenth-Century Japan (2003). As a member of the 

Freer’s International Scholarly Advisory Board for American Art, she participated in 

the 2011 webinar and the online project “The Story of the Beautiful: Freer, Whistler, 

and Their Points of Contact.” Dr. Ono is also curating the fi rst-ever retrospective 

exhibition of Whistler’s work in Japan. 

Anna Gruetzner Robins is professor of the history of art at the University of Reading. She has published widely on late nineteenth-century art, including an edition of 

Walter Sickert’s complete writings on art (2000) and A Fragile Modernism: Whistler 

and His Impressionist Followers (2007). In 2005 she was cocurator (with Richard 

Thomson) of the exhibition Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec. She is currently completing a book on the London art world in the 1890s.

John Siewert teaches courses in modern and contemporary art at the College of 

Wooster, where he is an associate professor. After graduating from the University of 

Minnesota with a BA in art history, Siewert went on to earn his MA and PhD from 

the University of Michigan. A former Fulbright, Smithsonian (affi liated with the Freer 

Gallery of Art), and Luce Foundation Fellow, he held an appointment as research 

fellow at the Centre for Whistler Studies, University of Glasgow, from 1996 to 2006. 

His numerous publications on Whistler include an essay and entries in the catalogue 

for Turner, Whistler, Monet, an exhibition seen in Toronto, Paris, and London in 2005. 

Currently, he is completing a book manuscript titled Whistler and the Aesthetic Landscape of London, with the institutional and fi nancial support in 2012–13 of a Smithsonian Senior Fellowship at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 

Washington, D.C.

WhistlerBook.indb 202 WhistlerBook.indb 202 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
IndexWhistlerBook.indb 204 WhistlerBook.indb 204 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

Académie Carmen, 179

Academy, 59, 107, 110

Ackroyd, Peter, 79n25

Adams, James, 86, 90

Aestheticism, 7, 8, 9–10, 55–65, 62, 68, 70–71, 78n8, 82, 

111–112, 113–115, 121, 150–151, 152, 154, 155, 

156, 158–159, 160–161. See also Art for Art’s Sake

Aesthetic movement, iii, 6, 7–8, 10, 31, 46, 47, 107–109, 

149, 156, 173, 182

androgyny, 110, 116–118

commercialism, 7, 112, 121, 130, 135

connotations of sickness, 107, 111–112, 117–118, 117

critics, 107, 109–111, 143

display, 48, 135, 135–136, 150

elevating taste, 81–82, 182

fashion, 108, 121, 126–128, 128–129

gender, 107–112, 113, 115, 116, 119n16

interior decoration, 70–71, 113–115, 135–136, 176, 

178

parodies, 110, 110, 111, 111–112

Aird, Sir John, 157

alchemy, 9, 72–76, 78n11,18

Alexander, Cicely, 55, 55

Alexander, John White, 47

Isabella and the Pot of Basil, 47

Allied Art Salon, 174

Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 121–122, 155

American Camoufl age Corps, 181

American Car and Foundry Company, 158

American Eagle Hut, 176, 177 179–180, 180, 181–182

American Magazine of Art, 181

American War Relief, 174

Armory Show (1913), 173

Armstrong, Carol, 84

Armstrong, Thomas, 77

The Lesson, 108, 109

Arnold, Horace Lucien, 159

Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s 

Mother (Whistler), 93, 94–96, 95, 96–98, 

102nn9,10, 103n19, 175, 175, 176, 179

Art for Art’s Sake, 7–8, 10, 31, 57–58, 108, 112, 143, 150, 

165, 173, 181

Art Institute of Chicago, vii, 5, 28, 34, 35

The Artist’s Reality (Rothko), 16

Art-Journal Illustrated Catalogue, 125

Art Nouveau, 47, 169

Arts and Crafts movement, 10., 126, 135–136, 137–139, 

136, 143

Arts and Crafts Exhibition (1890), 136

Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, 136–137

Art Worlds (Becker), 8

Ashbee, Charles Robert, 136

Asleson, Robyn, 109

Athenaeum, 57, 58, 59

Athenaeum Club, 171

Atwood, Miss, 74

Avery, S. P., 33, 34

Avon Old Farms School, 42

Bain, Alexander, 58–59

Baltimore Museum of Art, 17, 29, 35

Barclay, John, 130

Barkan, Leonard

Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, 20

Baudelaire, Charles, 74, 78n18, 79n23

Beard, George

American Nervousness, 159

Bearden, Romare, 17

Beardsley, Aubrey, 182

Beaux, Cecilia, 174

Becker, Howard S.

Art Worlds, 8

Belgravia: A London Magazine, 113

Bellows, George, 174

Benson, W. A. S., 155

Benton, Thomas Hart, 20

Beuys, Joseph, 72

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 34, 35

bijutsu (fi ne art), 165, 166

Bijutsu shinpo- (art magazine), 167, 169

Bixby, William K., 157, 158, 161

Black, Peter, 19

Blake, William, 20

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 76, 79n25

Blakelock, Ralph, 44

Blanche, Jacques-Émile, 84

Blashfi eld, Edwin

Carry On!, 174, 175, 183n14

Blavatsky, Mme., 74

blue-and-white (porcelain), 3, 5, 18, 22, 71, 82, 110, 123, 

177–178. See also Chinese porcelain and Kangxi 

porcelain

Bochner, Mel, 20

Boldini, Giovanni, 174

Booth, George G., 181

WhistlerBook.indb 205 WhistlerBook.indb 205 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
206 Palaces of Art

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. See Museum of 

Fine Arts, Boston

Boston Public Library, 34

Bourgeois Galleries (New York), 183n8

Bouvier, Gustavus

In the Morning: Three Young Ladies in an Aesthetic 

Interior, 113

Brett, David, 156

bric-a-brac, 10, 122, 128–129, 131

British Library, 74

British Museum, 35, 96, 96–101, 130

Brown, Ford Madox, 129

Brown, Milton, 182

Brown, Myra, 36

Brownell, William C., 40

Browning, Robert

“Andrea del Sarto,” 65n33

Bucaslossi, E., 112

Builder, 63n9

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 74, 78n18

Burbank, Emily, 178

Burne-Jones, Edward, 65n38, 67, 71, 74, 107, 110, 

150–151, 151

Burrell Collection, Glasgow, 32

Bury, Shirley, 132n20

Butler, Judith, 124

Byron, Lord George Gordon

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, 42

cabinets of curiosities, 128, 133n34

Cage, John, 22

Caine, T. Hall, 123

Calder, Alexander, 22

Calmour, Alfred Cecil

The Amber Heart (play), 29

Campbell, Lady Archibald, 89–90

Canfi eld, Richard A., 42, 47

Carte, Richard D’Oyly, 112

Cassatt, Mary, 20, 40

Castellani, 125, 126

Cauda Pavonis, 72, 73,

Cavafy, George, 42

Cavafy, John, 42

Caxton Club, Chicago, 33

Cazin, Jean Charles, 101n4

Center for Advanced Study in the History of 

Art, 17

Chase, William Merritt, 47

Chevalier Bayard. See under Herter, Albert

Child, Theodore, 64n23, 154

Chinese porcelain, 5, 108, 176. See also blue-andwhite (porcelain) and Kangxi porcelain

Christian Science Monitor, 174

Cikovsky, Nicolai, 40

Clemenceau, Georges, 82

Cleveland Malleable Iron Company, 159

Cobain, Kurt, 23

Coburn, Alvin Langdon

Portrait of Charles Lang Freer, 159, 159

Colby College Museum of Art, vii, 5, 35

Cole, Sir Henry, 76

Collcutt, Thomas E., 156

Collin, Raphaël, 167

Colnaghi, London, 34

The Colonel Waltz (sheet music cover), 112, 112

Colvin, Sidney, 59

Committee on Public Information, 173–174, 180

Comparative Exhibition of Native and Foreign Art,

160

Connecting Whistler (online festschrift), 19

Contemporary Review, 59

Copley Hall

Whistler Memorial Exhibition (1904), 48, 48,

160, 160, 167

Copley Society, 48

Corcoran Gallery of Art, 17

Core Club, New York, 22

Cornforth, Fanny, 124, 124

Cort, Louise, 3

cosmopolitanism, vii, 6–8, 39, 41, 46, 154

Courbet, Gustave, 87

Cranbrook Academy, 181

Crane, Walter

“Imperial Federation Map,” 152, 153

Creel, George, 173–174

Curran, Grace Wickham, 179

Curry, David Park, 3, 5, 21

Curry, John Steuart, 19

Daily News, 57, 63n11

Dalou, Jules, 82

Darwin, Charles, 59

Daston, Lorraine J., 65nn30–31

David Stern Company, 16

Davis, Elliot Bostwick, 40, 45

Dawson, Elizabeth, 32

Dawson, Frances. See Leyland, Frances

decorative art, 6–7, 10, 45–46, 68, 93, 100, 108, 

113–114, 122–123, 130, 134n56, 135–142, 

151, 156, 159, 175–178

Degas, Edgar, 40, 84, 101n4

de Kay, Charles, 40

de Montfort, Patricia, 18

De Morgan, William, 71

tile panel for the ocean liner Sutlej, 157,

157–158

Deschamps Gallery, 57

de Steiger, Isabelle, 74

Dewing, Thomas Wilmer, 158

de Wolfe, Elsie, 178–179

Dickens, Charles, 57

display strategies

WhistlerBook.indb 206 WhistlerBook.indb 206 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
Index 207

Aesthetic movement, 135, 135–136, 143

Arts and Crafts movement, 135–137, 136, 143

commercial spaces, 122, 130, 131, 136

museums, 43, 44–49

Whistler’s contributions, 21, 136

dualism, 59, 60, 61–62, 65n31

du Bois, Guy Pène, 173

Du Maurier, George

“Aesthetic Love in a Cottage,” 110

“Aesthetic Midday Meal,” 112

aesthetic parodies, 110, 110, 111, 112, 113–

114, 115, 142–143

English Society, 119n22

“An Infelicitous Question,” 114

“Intellectual Epicures,” 113, 113

“Love-Agony,” 115, 115

“Nincompoopiana: The Mutual Admiration 

Society,” 114, 117, 117

and T. Armstrong, 109

“The Passion for Old China,” 114

“The Six-Mark Teapot,” 110, 110

Dunn, Henry Treffry, 122–123, 124

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Theodore Watts-Dunton in 

Drawing-Room, 123

Duret, Théodore, 18, 95

Durlacher Brothers, 42

“Duveneck boys,” 47

Eagle Hut. See American Eagle Hut

Eastlake, Charles

Hints on Household Taste, 127

Edison Swan, 154–156

Edward VII, 33

electricity, 154–155

Eliot, George, 64n24

Encuentros (symposium), 25n22

Escott, Thomas, 57, 63n11

Estabrook, John Nichols, 24n17

The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler (Lochnan), 

17

Evans, William T., 161

exhibition strategies. See display strategies

Expositions Universelles, 91n7 (1882), 125 

(1867), 166 (1878), 169 (1900)

Fantin-Latour, Henri, 79n23, 82

fashion, 18, 31, 88, 107, 108, 118n2, 121, 125–126, 

128–129, 155

Feldman, Jessica R., 123, 127

Fenollosa, Ernest F., 159

Fifth Avenue Shop Window Display, 174

Fine Art Society, London, 28, 35

fi rst trippers, 157

fog, 55–57, 58, 60, 62, 62–63n5, 63nn8–11,13, 

64n15, 65nn33,36 

Foo, Maya, 20

Forain, Jean-Louis, 101n4

Forbes, James Staats, 155–158

Fortnightly Review, 57, 59, 63n11, 64nn23–24

Foster + Partners, 40, 45

Fourth Liberty Loan Drive, 174

Frankenthaler, Helen, 20

Franklin, Maud, 21, 31–32, 98, 116

Freedgood, Elaine, 127

Freedman, Jonathan, 130

Freer, Charles Lang, 29, 48, 158–160, 161

collection, 4, 17, 29, 32, 34, 157, 158–159, 159

Peacock Room, 2–3, 21, 157–158

portraits of, 3, 159, 159

Freer Gallery of Art, 17, 20, 28, 30–31, 34, 35, 

157

Freer’s planning of, 161

Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, vii, 5

Peacock Room, 3, 4, 5, 21

and Whistler Etchings online catalogue, 28, 35

French Symbolists. See Symbolists

Fried, Michael, 86–87

Fujishima Takeji, 169

Myo- jo- illustration, 169

Fuller, Margaret, 78–79n18

Fun, 57

Furniture Gazette, 154

Galerie Durand-Ruel, 91n7

Gallatin, Albert Eugene, 174, 175, 182

Suggestions and Information for Artists, Architects, 

Sculptors, and Those Practicing the Allied 

Arts Desiring to Apply Their Knowledge to 

War Work, 174

Garth Fagan Dance, 15

Gauguin, Paul, 22, 82, 93, 98, 102n15

Volpini Suite, 102–103n15

Geffroy, Gustave, 84–87, 95

Geibun (literary magazine), 169

Gellatly, John, 160, 161

Gemini G.E.L., 20, 22

Georgetown University Library, 17

Getscher, Robert, 21

The Stamp of Whistler (exhibition catalogue), 

21

Gibson, Charles Dana, 174

Gilbert and Sullivan

HMS Pinafore, 39–40

Patience, 112

Gilliam, Sam, 17

Giuliano, Carlo, 63n9, 126

necklace, 126, 133n28

Glasgow University. See University of Glasgow

Gloriani, 100

Godwin, E. W., 76, 91n7, 114

Goncourt brothers, 166

Gonse, Louis, 166

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208 Palaces of Art

Gould, Mrs. Jay, 176

Goupil’s (Goupil Gallery, London), 102n15

Gow, Anne, 19

Goya, Francisco de, 20

Graphic, 56

illustration in, 56

Great Exhibition, London (1851), 131

Greaves, Alice, 32

Greaves, Walter, 32

Greenwood, Frederick, 74

Grimshaw, John Atkinson

Day Dreams, 125, 125

Grosvenor Gallery, London, 6, 31, 33, 56, 62n1, 

63n11, 107, 108, 110, 118, 135, 143n3, 155

electrical network, 155, 155

Haden, Francis Seymour, 34, 102n12

Portrait of a Lady (etching), 36n9

“The Thames from Its Source to the Sea,” 21

Hadley, James

Aesthetic teapot, 111

Hall, Major H. Byng, 128

Hamilton, Walter, 109

Harley manuscripts, 72, 74

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room

(Whistler), 1–5, 2, 4, 67, 67–79, 149 149, 

150–152, 177

alchemical allusions, 75

dispute over payment, 68, 71, 76, 79n27, 151, 

157

in Freer Gallery of Art, 3, 4, 5, 21

in Freer’s Detroit mansion, 3, 5, 157–158

L’Art et L’Argent; or, the Story of the Room, 69, 

69, 70, 76

in London (Prince’s Gate), 1–3, 3, 150, 152

use of gold, 74, 75

Whistler’s butterfl y signature, 72

Hashiguchi Goyo

- , 169

book design, 170

Hassam, Childe, 44

Hausberg, Margaret, 19

Haweis, Mary Eliza, 155

The Art of Beauty, 131

Hawthorne, Julian, 78–79n18

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 78–79n18

Hayashi Tadamasa, 165, 165–167

letter to Shinagwa Yajiro, 166, 166

“On Dr. Toyama’s Speech,” 166

Hecker, Frank J., 158, 159, 160

Herter, Adele McGinnis, 179–181

Herter, Albert, 179–181

Chevalier Bayard, 180, 180–181

The Great Crusade, 181–182, 181

Portrait of Bessie, 179, 179

Portrait of the Artist’s Son (Everit A. Herter), 181, 

182

Près Choisis, 179

Herter, Christian, 179

Japanese Parlor, Vanderbilt mansion, 177–178, 

178

Herter, Everit, 181, 182

Herter Brothers. See Herter, Christian

Herter Looms, 180

Hideo Takumi, 169

Hiffernan, Joanna, 108, 108, 109

Highmore, Ben, 137

Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Conn., 42

Hiroshige, Utagawa, 71, 167, 169, 170–171

Rokuju-yo Shu Meisho Zue (Views of Famous 

Places in the 60-odd Provinces), 32

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 17

Hitchcock, Ethan Allen, 78n18

Hokusai, Katsushika, 167

Profi le of Geisha, 32, 33

The Sazaido Hall of the Temple, Gohyakurakanji,

32, 33

Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (series), 32, 33

Turban-shell Hall of the Five-Hundred-Raka 

Temple, 33

Holland Park (1 Holland Park)

morning room, 140, 140

Homer, Winslow, 43

Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, 156

Hopkinson, Martin, 19

Horn, Rebecca, 72

Hosun (art and literature magazine), 167–168, 

169, 170

House and Garden, 178

Howell, Charles Augustus, 33, 154

Hughes & Kimber, 32

Huish, Marcus B., 28

Hunt, William Holman, 121

Hunterian, The, 28, 29, 34, 35

Hutchinson, Joshua H., 34

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 91n7, 101n4

Certains, 82, 84, 89–90

H. Wunderlich & Co., New York, 33. See also 

Wunderlich gallery

hyperesthesia, 60, 61

Illustrated London News, 110

Illustrated Review, 56

interior decoration, 122–123, 175–179. See also

Aesthetic movement

interiority, concept of, 7, 9, 84

International Exhibition, London (1862), 125

International Fine Print Dealers Association, 35

Ionides family, 140. See also Holland Park

Ishii Hakutei, 170

James, Henry, 40, 40, 47, 57, 60–61, 65n33, 100, 

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103n20

The Ambassadors, 100–101

The Princess Casamassima, 103n20

James, William, 61, 62, 153

Japan, 165

Japanese art

infl uence on Whistler, 32, 71, 165, 167, 

168–169

Whistler’s infl uence on, 7, 165–171

japonisme, 7, 71, 166

Jeckyll, Thomas, 2, 68, 151, 177–178

Jenkins, Ian, 121

jewelry, 126, 126–128, 132n26

Jobs, Steve, 15, 16

Johns, Jasper, 20

Johnson, John G., 158

Johnston, John Humphreys

Le Domino Rose, 46

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 59

Judy

“The Sage-Green Sickness,” 117, 117, 118

Jugend (German magazine), 170

Jung, Carl, 78–79n18

Kaneko Kentaro, 171

Kangxi porcelain, 2, 3, 5. See also blue-and-white 

(porcelain) and Chinese porcelain

Kant, Immanuel, 7, 59

Karolik, Maxim and Martha, 41

Karolik Collection, 41, 44

Kelmscott House

dining room, 139, 139

Kelmscott Manor, 141, 142

Kennedy, Edward G., 27, 28, 41, 42

The Etched Works of Whistler, 17, 34

Kennedy Galleries, New York, 34

Kinoshita Mokutaro-

, 170

“Inspired by Whistler’s Painting” 170

Kitahara Hakushu, 170

“Blue and Gold” 170

Knaths, Karl, 43

Kodak, 16

Ko- fu- (magazine), 167–168

Koto, 125

Kramer, Hilton, 45

Kreider, Tim, 22–23

Kume Keiichiro-

, 167, 166–167

“An Aspect of Whistler’s Life,” 168–169

“Whistler vs. Ruskin and the Origin of 

Impressionism,” 169

Ladies’ Home Journal, 179

Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, 35

La Farge, John, 46

Lane, Fitz Henry

Owl’s Head, Penobscot Bay, 41, 41

Lane, John, 102n7

Lathrop, Brian, 33, 34

Laurens, Jean-Paul, 167

Leclercq, Julien

Le Caractère et la main (Character and the 

Hand), 82, 84, 89–90, 92n19

Léger, Fernand, 182

Leighton, Frederic, 27, 71, 121–122, 155

Leighton House, 71, 137

Les XX (Les Vingt), 85, 91n11

Le Vieux, Pierre Terrail, seigneur de Bayard 

(Chevalier Bayard). See under Herter, 

Albert

Lewes, George Henry, 59–60, 61–62, 64nn24–25

Lewis, Norman, 17, 20

Leyland, Frances (Mrs. Frederick R.), 31–32, 74

Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of 

Mrs Frances Leyland (Whistler), 18, 

31, 87, 89

Leyland, Frederick R., 151–154, 155–156

collection, 2, 150–151, 154, 155, 177

dispute with Whistler, 68, 70–71, 76, 79n27, 

151, 158

house at 49 Prince’s Gate, 1, 2–3, 151–152, 

152, 154, 177

portraits of, 87, 88

Leyland Line, 152, 153–154

Liberty & Co.; Liberty’s, 76, 134n56

Library of Congress, 17, 34

Lichtenstein, Roy, 20

Lindsay, Sir Coutts, 155

Lippincott’s Magazine, 65n34

Liquid Paper, 9, 16

Liverpool Steamship Owners’ Association, 

153–154

Lochnan, Katharine, 17, 19, 21

The Etchings of James McNeill Whistler, 17, 21, 

32

Whistler, Turner, Monet, 21

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 17

Loti, Pierre, 101n4, 103n16

Louise, Princess, 76

Lucas, George, 17

Lucy, Henry, 157

Ludovici, A. J., 111

“With Yearnings for Your Intense Joy,” 111, 

111

Luks, George, 43, 174

Lunder, Peter and Paula, viii, 17

Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, vii, viii, 

5, 10, 15

Lunder Foundation, vii, 35

Luxembourg Gardens, 89, 94

Whistler’s lithographs of, 97, 97–101, 98, 99

Luxembourg Museum, 93, 94–109. See also 

Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of 

WhistlerBook.indb 209 WhistlerBook.indb 209 9/9/13 2:39/9/13 2:3
210 Palaces of Art

the Painter’s Mother

Lyceum Theatre, 29

Lysack, Kristin, 131

MacColl, D. S., 95, 102nn7–8

MacDonald, Helen, 19, 21

MacDonald, Kathy, 19

MacDonald, Norman, 18, 19

Macmillan’s Magazine, 110

MacMonnies, Frederick, 179

Magazine of Art, 56, 111, 117

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 18, 82, 95, 99–100, 101n4, 

102n15, 103n17

“Billet à Whistler,” 99

Manet, Edouard, 93

Olympia, 96

Mansfi eld, Howard, 33, 158, 159–160

A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etchings and DryPoints of James Abbott McNeill Whistler

(1909), 27

Marillier, H. C., 129

Marin, John, 17

Marley, Anna, 17

Mary, Queen of Scots, 97

Matisse, Henri, 22

Mauclair, Camille, 89–90

Maudsley, Henry, 59, 65n30

Maus, Octave, 85–86

May, Phil, 101n4

Mayor’s Committee on National Defense for the 

City of New York, 174

Meacock, Joanna, 19

Meiji Bijutsukai (Meiji Fine Arts Society), 166

Meiji Restoration, 7, 157, 168, 169

Menpes, Mortimer, 166

photogravure of Whistler, 2

Mercure de France, 82

Merton Abbey, 141

Meryon, Charles, 19

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 34, 174, 

183n14

Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Barkan), 20

Michigan-Peninsular Car Company, 159

Miles, Hamish, 18

Millais, John Everett, 76

Millet, Jean-François, 43

Milwaukee Public Library, 47

Mind, 59

mind-body distinction. See dualism

Miró, Joan, 182

modernism, 7, 129, 182

Monet, Claude, 57

Monkhouse, Cosmo, 150

Montesquiou-Fezensac, Comte Robert de, 87, 88

Moore, Albert, 82, 141

Beads, 109, 109

female imagery, 107, 109, 109, 116

An Open Book, 114, 114

A Venus, 150–151

Morris, Jane Burden, 71, 109–110, 110, 116

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., 68

Morris, William, 10, 67, 73, 137–141, 142, 143. See 

also Kelmscott House; Kelmscott Manor

Bird, 138

The Forest, 140

Kennet, 142, 142

Peacock and Dragon, 138

Pimpernel, 139, 139, 141

Poppy, 137, 137–138

Strawberry Thief, 140

Vine, 138, 138, 139–140

Morris and Co.

1 Holland Park morning room, 140, 140

Green Dining Room, 68, 68

Mucha, Alphonse, 169

Munsey’s Magazine, 39

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 46

museum displays, 43–48, 130

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Art of the Americas wing, 8, 39–49

installation views, 44, 45, 46, 47

Karolik Collection, 41, 44

Whistler collection, 8, 41–43, 44, 44, 45, 46,

47, 47–48, 49n9

Museum of Living Art, 182

Muther, Richard, 85

Myo- jo- (art and literature magazine), 169, 169,

170

National Gallery of Art. See also Center for 

Advanced Study in the History of Art

bequests, 19–20

French galleries, 40

Treasure Houses of Britain (exhibition), 44–45

Whistler collection, 17, 19–20, 34

nationality/nationalism, 39, 40–41, 44, 47

naturalistic art, 58

Nature, 59

networks. See social networking

New York, Bryant Park. See American Eagle Hut

New York Public Library, 34, 35

New York Sun, 64n23

New York Times, 21, 22, 23, 40, 45, 175, 178, 180, 

182

Nicholson, William, 174

Nochlin, Linda, 16

Nocturne (Sutton), 18

Obach & Co., 33

O’Keeffe, Georgia, 17, 20

O’Neill, Morna, 136–137

Ovid

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Metamorphoses, 71–72, 77

Owen, Alex

The Place of Enchantment, 74

Pall Mall Gazette, 74

Pan no kai (Association of the Greek god of Pan), 

170, 172n22

Paris

rue de Rome, 99

rue du Bac, 95

rue Notre Dame des Champs (Whistler’s 

studio), 9, 81, 81–91, 93–101, 93

Paris World’s Fair, 1878. See Expositions 

Universelles

Parliamentary Papers

“The Method Adopted at the Port of 

Montreal for Stowing Grain Cargoes,” 

154, 154

Partch, Harry, 22

Partridge, J. Bernard

The White Feather, 116, 116–117

Pater, Walter

on Aestheticism, 10, 69, 121, 142, 143

alchemy imagery, 72–73

infl uence on Whistler, 68–69, 72–73

“Poems by William Morris,” 69

The Renaissance, 69, 72

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 35

Peabody and Stearns, 46

Peacock Room. See Harmony in Blue and Gold: The 

Peacock Room

The Peacock Room Comes to America (exhibition, 

2011), 3, 5, 21–22

peacocks, 70–73, 123, 138

Pearson, Roger, 99

Peladan, Joséphine Sâr, 93

Pels, Peter, 128

Peninsular and Oriental Steam Ship Company 

(P&O), 71, 156–157

Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 17, 27, 156

Pennell, Joseph, 17, 27, 102n8, 156

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 17, 33

Perry, Commodore Matthew C., 165

Perry, Thomas, 48

Pershing, General John J., 181, 181

Pershing’s Crusaders (fi lm), 181

publicity poster, 181

Petit gallery, 84

Petri, Grischka, 19

Philadelphia Museum of Art, 34

Philip, Rosalind Birnie, 30

Phillips, Duncan, 173

Phillips Collection, 17

physiological aesthetics, 55–62

Picasso, Pablo, 182

Poe, Edgar Allen, 78–79n18

Poggi, Christine, 7

Pointon, Marcia, 124

Polke, Sigmund

Hermes Trismegistos I–IV, 72, 72

Pope, Alfred Atmore, 42, 158, 159

Pope, Theodate (Mrs. John Riddle), 42

Postlethwaite, Jellaby, 112

Pottery and Glass Trades’ Journal, 154

Poynter, Edward

Helen, 126, 126, 133n28

Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 7, 141, 143, 150

Prince’s Gate. See under Leyland, Frederick R.

Princess Louise, 76

Punch magazine, 107–108, 109, 110–112, 142. See 

also Du Maurier, George

Quarterly Review, 59

Queen, 126

Quilter, Harry (‘Arry), 74, 78n15, 110

Rae, George, 125

Rathbone, Perry, 42

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), 20

The Artist’s Mother Seated, in an Oriental 

Headdress, Half Length, 96

The Artist’s Mother Seated at a Table, 96

Revillon, Joseph W., 27

Ribner, Jonathan, 57

Riddle, Mrs. John, 42

Rivett-Carnac Collection, 132n26

Robert, Thomas, 102n7

Robertson, Graham, 129

Rochefoucauld, Comte Antoine de la, 101n4

Rodin, Auguste, 82

Rogers, Malcolm, 45

Rosenwald, Lessing J., 17, 19

Rosenwald Collection, 17, 20

Ross, Denman, 42

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 10, 59, 71, 74, 113–131, 

121, 151

Astarte Syriaca, 124

The Beloved (The Bride), 124, 124–125, 128–

129, 133n43

The Blue Bower, 107–108, 123, 124, 124, 125

Bocca Baciata, 125, 126

Fair Rosamund, 124

female imagery, 107–108, 130

in Leyland’s collection, 152, 154

Monna Pomona, 132n20

Monna Vanna, 125, 126, 127, 127, 133n29

Perlascura, 109, 110

photograph of, 121

La Pia de’ Tolomei, 110

Regina Cordium, 132n20

“The Burden of Nineveh,” 130

Tudor House, 71, 122–123

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212 Palaces of Art

Rossetti, William Michael, 57, 71, 107, 129

Rothenstein, William, 94, 102n7

Rothko, Christopher, 16

Rothko, Mark, 20

The Artist’s Reality, 16

Rowlandson, Thomas, 19

Royal Academy, 39, 135, 136

Royal Library at Windsor, 33

Ruskin, John, 68, 74, 141

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 44

Sakai Gisaburo-

 (Saisui)

“Whistler, a Critical Biography,” 167, 167

Salon des Refusés, 86

Sambourne, Linley

“Fancy Portrait No. 37,” 112

Sarasate, Pablo de, 87

Sargent, John Singer, 39–40, 46, 101n4

La Carmencita, 96

Sartre, Jean-Paul

The Age of Reason, 101

Sato-

 Haruo, 170

“Supein-ken no ie” (The House of a Spanish 

Dog), 170

Saturday Review, 59

Schaffer, Talia, 114

Scudder, Janet, 178

Seated Woman and an Attendant (Greek), 96,

96–97

Segalen, Victor, 130

Shaw, Richard Norman, 177

Sherard, Robert Harborough, 93, 101n6

interview with Whistler, 93–96, 98–99, 

101nn2–3, 102n15

Shinagawa Yajiro

letter from Hayashi Tadamasa, 166, 166

Shinn, Earl (Edward Strahan), 177

Shinshisha (New Poetry Society), 169

Simpson, Marc

Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art 

of Painting Softly, 21

Sinfi eld, Alan, 119n16

Sinnett, A. P., 74

Sketch (Japanese magazine), 167

Smalley, George, 39

Smithsonian American Art Museum, 17, 21

Smithsonian Institution, 161. See also Freer 

Gallery of Art

social networks and networking, 8, 9, 10, 94, 

151–152, 155, 156–158, 160, 165

Société Nationale, 47

Society of Art Collectors, Incorporated, 160

Society of British Artists, 136

Sotheby’s, 34

Southampton, 157

South Kensington Museum. See Victoria and 

Albert Museum

Sparks, Nathaniel, 30

Special Collections, University of Glasgow, 28

Speke Hall, 31, 31–34, 32

Spencer, Herbert, 59

Spencer, Robin, 18, 154

“Whistler, Manet, and the Tradition of the 

Avant-Garde,” 21

Splendor Solis, 72, 74

Spooner, Elizabeth, 46

Standard, 62n5

Steer, Philip Wilson

Children Paddling, Walberswick, 99–100, 100

Steichen, Edward, 47

Stephens, F. G., 126, 128

Stetz, Margaret, 115

Strether, Lambert, 100–101

Suez Canal, 156

Sully, James, 59–60, 64n27, 65nn31–32

Sutherland, Sir Thomas, 156, 157

Sutton, Denys

Nocturne, 18

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 59, 64n23, 76, 113, 

119n3

William Blake: A Critical Essay, 76

Symbolists, 7, 9, 82, 84–86, 88, 90, 98

Symons, Arthur, 57, 149–150, 151

Syracuse University Art Galleries, 34

Tack, Augustus Vincent, 174

Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 17

Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit

(exhibition), 17

Taylor, Edward, 78–79n18

Tedeschi, Martha, 19

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord

“The Palace of Art,” 1, 10, 149, 173, 182

Terra Foundation, 21

Terry, Ellen, 29, 76

Thayer, Abbott, 161

Thomas, Ralph

A Catalogue of the Etchings and Drypoints of 

James Abbott Macneil Whistler, 27

Thomas Colville Fine Art, 35

Thorp, Nigel, 18, 21

Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 46

Times, The (London), 156

Toyama Masakazu

“The Future of Japanese Painting,” 166

Tree, Beerbohm, 29

Trimosin, Salomon

Peacock in Flask, 72

Tryon, Dwight William, 158

Tudor House, 71, 122–123

Turin exhibition of 1902, 136–137

Turner, Whistler, Monet (exhibition), 17

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Index 213

UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, 34

Union League Club, New York, 33

United States Military Academy at West Point, 40

University of Glasgow, 28, 31, 34, 35

Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, vii, 5

University of Michigan, 31, 34

University of Reading, 93

Vanderbilt, Alice, 178

Vanderbilt, George Washington, 87

Vanderbilt, Mrs. William K., 176

Vanderbilt, William H., mansion

Japanese Parlor, 177–178, 178

van Gogh, Vincent, 82

Vanity Fair

Talon Rouge, 77

Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva

Las Meninas, 82

Venice Set, 28

Victoria and Albert Museum (formerly the South 

Kensington Museum), 67

jewelry, 125–126, 132nn20,26

Vienna World’s Fair (1873), 165

Vogel, Dorothy and Herbert, 20

Volpini Exhibition (1889), 102–103n15

Vuillard, Edouard, 100, 103n19

Mother and Sister of the Artist, 103n19

The Park, 100

Public Gardens: The Interrogation, 100, 100

Walker, Emery, 139

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 34

Wallace & Flockhart, 156

Warhol, Andy, 22

Warring, Stephen, 159

Waseda bungaku (literary magazine), 169

Watney, Blanche, 2, 178

Waugh, Evelyn, 129

Way, Thomas, 174

Webb, Philip, 67

Wedmore, Frederick, 110, 112

Whistler’s Etchings: A Study and a Catalogue, 27

Weinberg, Jonathan, 96

Weir, J. Alden, 174

Westminster Gazette, 101n3

Westminster Review, 59

Whirlwind, 99

Whistler, Anna Matilda, 18, 55, 76, 96. See also 

Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of 

the Painter’s Mother

Whistler, Beatrice, 18, 27, 30, 32, 97

portraits of, 29–30, 30

View from the Chateau Walls, Loches, 30, 30

Whistler, James McNeill

aesthetic networks, vii, 6, 7, 8, 9, 15–25, 30, 32, 

39–40, 43, 46–47, 59, 60, 64n23, 68–69, 

71, 73–74, 76, 78n18, 82, 98, 102n15, 

157, 159, 165, 166–167, 169–170, 173, 

179–180

and alchemy, 9, 47, 67, 71, 72–76

and Art for Art’s Sake, 7–8, 10, 31, 57–58, 108, 

112, 143, 150, 165, 173, 181

childhood, 97, 98, 100

children, 98

confl ict between spiritual and material aspects 

of art, 68, 69, 71, 75–76

correspondence, 18, 28, 70, 73–74, 76, 79n27, 

96

etchings, 19–20, 27, 28, 29–30, 32, 33, 75–76, 

79n23, 95

as exhibition designer, 21, 136

fi nances, 32, 42, 68, 69, 71, 75–76, 78n15, 

79n27, 151, 156, 157

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 165, 167

interest in the occult, 74

lithographs, 20, 28, 94

physiological aesthetics, 55–56, 59, 61, 62

portraits of, 2, 29–30, 47

hand of, by Leclercq, 82, 84, 89–90, 92n19

Head of Whistler, 29

in Paris studio, 81, 82, 83

The White Feather, 116, 116–117

publicity, 28, 75–76

“Red Rag,” 166

Ten O’Clock (lecture), 7, 47, 69, 72, 73–74, 75, 

165, 167, 170, 173

White House, 78n15, 156

works by (see also Arrangement in Grey and 

Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother;

Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock 

Room)

Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur 

Jacket, 87

Arrangement in Black and Gold: Comte Robert 

de Montesquiou-Fezensac, 87, 88

Arrangement in Black: La Dame au brodequin 

jaune—Portrait of Lady Archibald 

Campbell, 89, 89

Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F. R. Leyland,

87, 88

Arrangement in Brown and Black: Portrait of 

Miss Rosa Corder, 87

Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of 

Thomas Carlyle, 170

Arrangement in White and Black, 116, 117

L’Art et L’Argent; or, the Story of the Room,

69, 69

An Artist in His Studio, Seated before a Table

(ca. 1856), 81, 82

The Artist in His Studio (1865–66), 81–82, 83

Balustrade, Luxembourg Gardens, 102n14

The Band, Luxembourg Gardens, 102n14

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214 Palaces of Art

Bébés, Jardin du Luxembourg, 102n14

Bird-Cages, Chelsea, 29, 29

The Blue Wave, Biarritz, 42

[Canfi eld’s portrait], 42

Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen,

32, 168, 168

The Church–Brussels (Adoration), 29

Conversation under the Statue, Luxembourg 

Gardens, 97, 99

Cutler Street, Houndsditch, 29

Emanuel Hospital, 30

From Agnes Sorrel’s Walk, Loches, 30, 30

The Gold Scab: Eruption in Filthy Lucre (The 

Creditor), 69, 69

Gretchen at Heidelberg, 29

The Guitar Player (M.W. Ridley), 32

Harmony in Black, No. 10, 116–117

Harmony in Flesh Colour and Red, 42, 46

Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely 

Alexander, 55, 55

Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl—

Connie Gilchrist, 58, 58

The Last of Old Westminster, 41, 41, 42, 44, 

46

Little Rose of Lyme Regis, 41, 43, 44, 45, 46

Little Terrace, Luxembourg Gardens (G.443), 

102n14

The Little Terrace, Luxembourg Gardens

(G.444), 102n14

Market Place, Ostend (“Market, Calais”), 27

The Master Smith of Lyme Regis, 41, 43, 44,

46

Mother of Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian,

87–88

Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Old Battersea 

Bridge, 56, 56, 171

Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Battersea Reach,

57, 57

Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Cremorne Lights,

57, 57

Nocturne: Grey and Silver, 61

Nocturne in Black and Gold: Entrance to 

Southampton Water, 157

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, 

Venice, 42–43, 43, 44, 46

Nocturnes, 169

Nursemaids: “Les Bonnes du Luxembourg,”

97–98, 99, 99–100

The Pantheon, from the Terrace of the 

Luxembourg Gardens (C.70), 97, 98

The Pantheon from the Terrace, Luxembourg 

Gardens (G. 473), 102n14

The Piano (G.144), 32

Polichinelle, Jardin du Luxembourg, 102n14

La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, 68, 125, 

150, 150–151, 160

La Rétameuse, 29

Shipbuilder’s Yard, Liverpool, 32

The Silk Dress, 32

“Songs on Stone,” 99

Speke Hall: The Avenue, 31, 31–34

Under the Statue, Luxembourg Gardens,

102n14

The Steps, Luxembourg, 97, 97

Street in Old Chelsea, 42, 46, 47

Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of 

Mrs Frances Leyland, 18, 31, 87, 89

Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, 86,

86–87, 179

Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl,

108, 108–109, 113

Symphony in White, No. 3, 41, 109, 109, 114

The Terrace, Luxembourg, 97–98, 98

Tillie: A Model, 32

The Tyresmith, 99

The Velvet Dress, 31

Venice Set, 28

Venus Rising from the Sea, 159

View from the Chateau Walls, Loches, 30, 30

A Winter Fog, 62n5

Woman Sleeping in a Chair, 29–30, 30

Whistler, William, 96

Whistler Etchings Project, 9, 19, 27–37

Whistler’s Mother’s Cook Book, 18–19

Whistler v. Ruskin, 65n38, 75, 169

Whittemore, J. H., 158, 159

Wilde, Oscar, 93, 101n6, 110, 112

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 94

Wood, T. Martin, 114

Wordsworth, William, 73

World, 63n11

World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), Chicago, 

29, 160

World War I

artists’ contributions, 10, 176–182

“Fight for Her” (poster), 175

“Old Age Must Come” (poster), 176

World War II, 44

Wunderlich gallery, 42. See also H. Wunderlich & 

Co., New York

Yates, Edmund, 63n11

YMCA huts, 175–176. See also American Eagle 

Hut

Yoga (Western-style painting), 165, 168

Young, Andrew McLaren, 18

Zelman, Anita and Julius, 17

Zola, Émile, 82

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Smithsonian Institution

Scholarly Press