The Kitchen

1. Curry: James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, Pg. 168
The Kitchen was preceded by a pencil drawing, A Kitchen at Lutzelbourg [F.1898.164}. Both the drawing and the watercolor contain ideas which the artist utilized for an etching also entitled The Kitchen [F1888.15/F1898.239]. The pencil drawing exhibits a strong sense of spatial recession. Whistler built the drawing up from back to front. The woman was added after the window frame was drawn; the jug and box came after the fireplace and shelf. Although Whistler smudged in shadows with his finger, the drawing is full of light. The related watercolor is much richer in contrasts. It was drawn in pencil before dark washes were added. Again, the drawing is built from back to front, with the figure of the woman added atop the window frame and so on. Whistler's emphasis on orthagonals and spatial recession has a relentless, pedantic quality. By increasing the size of the woman in relation to the window, and by adding the heavy dark mass that frames her figure, Whistler greatly dramatized the image. He retained the compositional geometries of objects first seen in the pencil drawing, but the objects themselves have changed. The angle of the fireplace wall became a broom handle; the double doorway with its hat rack was replaced by a massive cupboard. The space itself has been narrowed considerably. Whistler's etching retained the dark figure against the light-filled opening of a cavelike space.