Harmony in Violet and Amber

1. Curry: James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, Pg. 202
Whistler's reinterpretation of established poses recalls the self-referential oeuvre of his French contemporary Edgar Degas. Both A Note in Green [F1902.165] and the Harmony in Violet and Amber [F1902.164] are part of a complex of works that revolve around what is essentially the same pose. The pose could be reversed, turned slightly, or altered here and there, but the most important variations are found in the artist's use of different color combinations.

The pose struck by Miss Finch in Harmony in Violet and Amber appeared in Whistler's oeuvre about a decade earlier. Whistler was then painting Florence, the daughter of his first significant patron, F.R. Leyland. Miss Finch's pose for A Note in Green can also be seen earlier, in an unfinished sketch for the portrait of Leyland himself. Whistler found the pose effective for both sexes, and he seems to have added it permanently to his formal vocabulary. Among the finished oil portraits that precede the two watercolors of Miss Finch are Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F.R. Leyland, 1870--1873, and Arrangement in White and Black, ca. 1876, a portrait of Whistler's mistress Maud Franklin. In each of these, Whistler explored the use of a monochrome palette.

Whistler reworked the Portrait of Miss Florence Leyland [Portland Museum of Art, Maine] at about the same time he created the two watercolors of Miss Finch. Degas may have stimulated Whistler to all this activity. When the French artist exhibited The Little Dancer of Fourteen Years at the Impressionist exhibition in 1881, "Paris could scarcely maintain its equilibrium" and Degas "became the hero of the hour. His name was on all lips, his statue discussed by all the art world." Huysmans commented that "at the first blow" Degas had upset traditional sculpture, "just as he had long ago shaken the convention of painting." This would not be the first instance in which Whistler was galvanized by a revolutionary event in the art community.

A photograph of Whistler's London studio, taken in 1881, shows a few studio props, including a statuette of a standing woman in a contemporary costume. Not a commercially produced object, the statuette appears to be "the work of a student modeler," possibly Whistler himself. Like the Little Dancer, Whistler's figure is a modern one, and it could easily have been inspired by Degas's triumph. Whistler might also have been aware of another Degas statue of 1881 called Schoolgirl. Whistler's statuette is as angular as Maud in Arrangement in White and Black. It is obviously related to the two watercolors of Milly Finch as well as the reworked portrait of Florence Leyland.

Unlike Degas, however, Whistler did not really take up sculpture as a sustained interest. Yet the statuette in his studio did serve him as a tool. Whistler's working sequence cannot be exactly determined, and it is unnecessary to assign an object the role of "study" on the basis of its medium. However, the statuette can be detected in his later paintings. Perhaps it served as a sort of pivot around which the variously related watercolors and oils rotate.

Whistler's statuette conflates the poses of the early Leyland portraits along with that of Maud Franklin. The statuette holds one arm akimbo, the other is extended along the body. In the watercolors now at the Freer Gallery, the poses are again separate: in one Miss Finch has her hand on her hip, in the other her hand is extended, and equipped with a large hat, like the one held by the statuette. Yet each work has completely different visual impact, largely because of the differing color schemes.

During the mid-1880s, Whistler executed three full-scale oil portraits of Miss Finch. Harmony in Coral and Blue [Hunterian] is similar to both the statuette and the watercolor Harmony in Violet and Amber [F1902.164]. Harmony in Fawn and Purple [Hunterian] approaches the watercolor Note in Green [F1902.165], although the hat has become a fan. For Harmony in Blue and Violet: Miss Finch [Hunterian], Whistler kept the fan, but moved it. Miss Finch's right arm now holds the flounces of her long dress. In all these works, great variations in color occur, but only slight changes in the pose.

The pose reappears yet again in Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple [oil painting, Cincinnati Art Museum], which was probably painted during the autumn of 1885. The portrait is thought to depict Olga Alberta Caracciolo, but the pose is essentially the one held by the Mlles. Leyland, Franklin, and Finch, as well as by the statuette. J.-E. Blanchet, a fellow artist, purchased the Caracciolo painting in 1885, noting that "I bought [it] from the painter...because the pose he used was the same as that in my portrait."

The statuette's whereabouts are unknown, and several of the related paintings have disappeared. But enough survive to record Whistler's fascination with an elegant pose, and his ability to rework a few notes into endless complex harmonies.

2. The Builder, May 24, 1884
"A good many contain figures of young girls reading, lounging, in various attitudes, their dresses and surroundings giving the colour combination which is denominated 'Pink Note' (N.B. Not a billet-doux, but a 'note' in the scale of colour), or 'harmony in Violet and Amber' [no. 19]. These figures are very slightly sketched, and their faces will certainly not bear looking close at; but they nearly all have character in pose, and show that there is good drawing underlying their shadowy similitude; one in particular, 'Yellow and Grey' 9430, a girl standing before a background of yellow, is charming in attitude and in the masterly indication of the figure."