The Influence Of The Far East

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

Whistler settled down in Chelsea, and became friendly with his neighbor Rossetti, who shared his taste for blue-and-white Chinese porcelain and for Japanese color-prints, and during his first years in London the artistic influence of the Far East became more pronounced in Whistler’s art. He surrounded himself with Oriental objects adn introduced them constantly into his pictures. In 1864 he painted ‘The Gold Screen’, against which sat a young woman in Japanese costume, surrounded by other variously colored objects from the Far East. About the same time he painted ‘La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine’, in which brilliant colors are again afforded by a Japanese dress. The original of this portrait was Miss Christina Spartali, daughter of the Greek Consul-General in London. Her sister Marie Spartali, afterwards Mrs Stillman, had been a pupil of Rossetti and sat to him for ‘Fiametta’ and other paintings. Owing to the family likeness common to the two sisters, it has been said that at this time Whistler was subject to Rossetti’s influence, but the resemblance between their works is a superficial one due only to the likeness of their respective models. There is no evidence that Whistler borrowed any of Rossetti’s methods, and the chief influences during the years in which Whistler formed his style of painting were Courbet and Manet, Velazquez and the masters of Japan. In etching he was principally influenced by Rembrandt and Méryon.

‘The Princess of the Porcelain Country,’ accepted by the Salon in 1865, was the first work by Whistler to be shown in any official exhibition in Paris. Other pictures of this Japanese period were ‘The Lange Leizen,’ in the Academy of 1864, ‘The Balcony,’ in the Academy of 1870, and most beautiful of all, ‘The Little White Girl’, also known as ‘Symphony in White No.II,’ shown at the Academy in the same year. The Japanese fan in the girl’s hand is the only direct confession of Oriental influence in this picture, which otherwise unites the Spanish gravity and realism of ‘At the Piano’ with the gay-colored decorativeness of a Hokusai or Hiroshige. After having seen this picture in Whistler’s studio, Swinburne wrote the poem afterwards included in Poems and Ballads:

Before The Mirror
Come snow, come wind or thunder,
High up in air,
I watch my face and wonder
At my bright hair,
Nought else exists or grieves
The rose at heart, that heaves
With love of her own leaves, and lips that pair.

I cannot tell what pleasures
Or what pains were,
What pale new loves and treasures
New years will bear;
What beam will fall, what shower
With grief or joy for dower,
But one thing knows the flower, the flower is fair.

The Influence Of The Far East (continued)