Essays
In April 2019, the Freer Gallery of Art invited a group of emerging American art scholars to visit the museum and participate in an immersive, four-day study of our unparalleled collection of James McNeill Whistler’s watercolors. Working with curators and conservators, participants honed their observational skills and learned about the artist’s pigments, papers, and working methods. Each scholar selected a watercolor by Whistler and wrote a short essay about the work using the techniques of close visual analysis.
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Venice Harbor, 1879–80
Diana Jocelyn Greenwold, Portland Museum of ArtWhistler visited Venice in 1879 on a commission from the Fine Arts Society in London to create a suite of etchings. Fresh from his break with long-time patron F. R. Leyland and his hollow victory in the Ruskin trial, the artist accepted the commission as a much-needed means of income and a way to escape London’s insular art world. Venice had been a subject of great interest to…
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London Bridge, 1881
Tara Contractor, Yale UniversityWith shimmering washes of gray and brown, London Bridge depicts the river Thames as if viewed from a boat on the water. Whistler had experimented with watercolor on and off from childhood, but it was this work that was publicized as his “first water-colour drawing.” Though undoubtedly a transitional work, London Bridge boldly announces…
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Nocturne: Grey and Gold–Canal, Holland, 1882
Erin R. Corrales-Diaz, Worcester Art MuseumNocturne: Grey and Gold—Canal, Holland evokes the shroud of darkness along an Amsterdam riverbank. The vertical format of Canal, Holland with its high horizon line alludes to the climbing composition in Japanese ukiyo-e prints. A thin, sloping line of opaque, ashen gray…
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Moreby Hall, 1882–84
Z. Serena Qiu, University of PennsylvaniaIn the early 1880s, Whistler was a house guest at Moreby Hall, located south of York in Yorkshire, where he encountered the scene that fills this watercolor. The manor house, built between 1818 and 1831, was then home to Thomas Henry Preston and his wife Georgiana, who might be the figure absorbed in an unseen…
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Milly Finch, 1883–84
Alba Campo Rosillo, University of DelawareThe watercolor Milly Finch signifies a turning point in James McNeill Whistler’s career. Created from 1883 to 1884, the painting constituted an intriguing study of ruptures and continuities, revealing the changing affiliations in Whistler’s personal, professional, and aesthetic fields. The circumstance of its creation prior to the presentation of the…
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Pink Note–The Novelette, 1883–84
Mary Okin, University of CaliforniaIn Pink Note–The Novelette, Whistler’s gaze settles on the domestic space and his mistress, Maud Franklin (1857–1941), reading. The title tells us that the book she holds is a novelette, the French diminutive for a work of fiction shorter than a novel, longer than a novella, and popular among women readers…
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Woman with a Child (Nude Figure and Cupid), 1890–95
Hyoungee Kong, Pennsylvania State UniversityIntimacy and tenderness saturate Whistler’s Woman with a Child, in which everything exudes softness—from the touches between the figures to those between the artist’s brush and the paper surface, and from the pastel palette to the fragile outlines in pale gray. Long brushstrokes of pale pink enwrap the figures in a warm aura. The artist’s characteristically thinned-down paint renders the…
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