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James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Harmon y Pink and Gray: Lady Meux, 1881

oil on canvas

76 x 36 5/16 in.

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Kurt F. Pantzer, Sr.

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James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts and spent five years of his youth in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father was employed in building the St. Petersburg-Moscow railroad.  Whistler received his first art training in Russia at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts.  He spent three years at West Point and remembered succeeding at drawing but failing at chemistry which resulted in his removal from the military academy. He once joked that “Had silicon been a gas, I would have been a general-major.”  In 1855 Whistler went to Paris, hoping to become an artist.  He achieved some success in Paris but moved to London in 1859 after his first major painting, At The Piano, was rejected by the Paris Salon.  Whistler was extremely influenced by music and soon began to paint with titles that included symphony, nocturne, composition, harmony and arrangement.  He is often thought to be the leader of the Tonalist style, because he was more interested in mood than reality.

In 1881, Lord Meux (pronounced “Mer”) commissioned Whistler to paint three full-length portraits of his young wife.  The first of these compositions exist in two nearly identical versions: the IMA painting and one at the Frick Collection in New York.  Because the IMA and Frick paintings are nearly identical, scholars have suggested that the IMA picture is a copy, executed at the time of the painting’s sale to Mr. Frick in 1916.  However, documentary and stylistic evidence indicate this is not the case and that, for whatever reason, Whistler (with or without the help of studio assistants) painted two nearly identical versions.  Scholarly controversy aside, Lady Meux, like all of Whistler’s portraits, is a carefully orchestrated composition of color harmonies, rather than an accurate likeness.  Nevertheless, the artist still managed to communicate the character of his sitter who was famous for both her beauty and her temper.

Reference

Richard Dorment, Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler.  James McNeill Whistler, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995.  ISBN-13: 978-0810939769