The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

But all the time he was amusing himself he worked, not so much in the studio of Gleyre—his official place of training, but irregularly attended—as in the streets and cafés of Paris and in his rooms. He divided his time between etching and painting, and in the former he appeared almost as a master in the first ‘French Set’ published as early as 1858. In the following year he produced his first great achievement in painting, ‘At the Piano’, which, though rejected by the Paris Salon of 1859, was hung at the Roya Academy in 1860 and subsequently purchased by the Academician John Philip, R A. In this picture, which represents his half-sister, Mrs Seymour Haden, seated, playing the piano, against which her little daughter Annie, in white, is standing, Whistler already shows the influence of Velazquez. Philip was well known as an intense admirer of this master, and it was doubtless the Spanish qualities in Whistler’s painting which led the older artist to buy it. Two years later Whistler set out for Madrid with the intention of seeing the pictures by Velazquez in the Prado, but on the way he stopped at a seaside resort, where he nearly got drowned while bathing and had to return to Paris without going to Madrid.

In 1863 he made his second attempt to exhibit in the Paris Salon, and again the jury rejected his picture, the full length portrait of a young Irish girl, known as ‘Jo’, dressed in white, holding a white flower, and standing against a white curtain. ‘The White Girl’, as it was first called, was the beginning of a series of pictures in which Whistler deliberately experimented in improvising a color harmony based on the infinitely delicate gradations of one dominant color. It was afterwards entitled ‘Symphony in White No.I’

So many paintings by artists of great talent were rejected by the Salon this year that the Emperor Napoleon III intervened, and by his order a selection of the rejected works wa shown in a special room which became famous as the Salon des Refusks. Of this epoch-making exhibition more will be said, when dealing with French painters who were Whistler’s contemporaries, but for the moment it must suffice to say that among the works there exhibited was ‘The White Girl’, which elicited high praise from the more advanced critics.

From 1859 Whistler had divided his time between Paris and London, and though he had many friends and admirers in the former city, he was hurt at the lack of official recognition. In 1863 he fixed his residence in London, where several of his family were already established. Whistler’s father had married twice, and one of the daughters by his first wife had married the English surgeon Seymour Haden, who afterwards made a great reputation as an etcher. Whistler’s mother had also now left America and was living in London with her second son William, a doctor. James Whistler himself had not only stayed and exhibited in London, but had worked there, for in 1859 he had already begun the series of etechings known as ‘The Thames Set,’ which marks the culminating point of his first etching period. ‘Black Lion Wharf’ may be taken as an example of the perfection of his technique in 1859, of the lightness and elasticity of his line, and of the vivacity of the whole. Though he afterwards produced etchings, perfect of their kind, in quite another style, Whistler never did anything better in their own way than some of the plates in ‘The Thames Set’.

The Influence Of The Far East (continued)