This summer The Frick Collection will present an exhibition dedicated to the colorful and often controversial artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). The Frick’s ensemble of four full-length portraits by Whistler will be displayed in the museum’s Oval Room alongside his evocative seascape Symphony in Grey and Green: The Ocean (1866). The exhibition will include pastels and etchings from his Venetian sojourn of 1879–80. Drawn entirely from the permanent collection, these works show Whistler’s command of three distinct media and demonstrate his concern for the harmony of form, color, and composition. It is the first time in more than twenty years that these portraits, pastels, and prints will be on view together.
Having left the United States as a young man in order to pursue his artistic ambitions in Europe, Whistler spent most of his life in London, where his reputation for dandyism rivaled that of Oscar Wilde. As one of the chief proponents of Aestheticism, he sought the harmonious synthesis of art’s formal and representational qualities. He was influenced by Baudelaire’s notion of the correspondence between music and painting and often likened his works to musical compositions, entitling them “Symphony,” “Harmony,” or “Nocturne.” With his avant-garde approach to painting, Whistler deliberately provoked more traditional members of London’s art world. In 1877, the critic John Ruskin ridiculed the artist’s nearly abstract Nocturne in Black and Gold, accusing him of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
Whistler worked as a portraitist throughout his career, securing commissions from members of the aristocratic and bohemian circles of London and Paris. His portrait of the actress Lady Meux, whose scandalous marriage to a wealthy baronet made her notorious, captures all her sensual flair. Titled Harmony in Pink and Grey: Portrait of Lady Meux (1881–82), the painting is as much an exploration of color and texture as it is a perceptive likeness. Whistler’s mature portraiture is well represented at the Frick by four canvases from the last three decades of his life. In addition to Lady Meux, they depict Frances Leyland (1871–74), the wife of Whistler’s patron, portrayed as the embodiment of his aesthetic ideals; Rosa Corder (1876–78), a fellow artist and the mistress of Whistler’s unofficial agent, Charles Augustus Howell; and Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac (1891–92), a poet and member of the Parisian social and intellectual elite. Displayed in close proximity to the Dutch and English “Grand Manner” portraits generally favored by Henry Clay Frick, these paintings reveal Whistler’s respect for — and transformation of — the art of the past.
Whistler was a master etcher, and he returned to this medium throughout his career. Following his financially disastrous libel suit against Ruskin, he traveled to Venice to complete a commission from the Fine Arts Society for twelve etchings, which came to be known as the “First Venice Set.” Whistler took a unique approach to the subject of Venice. Choosing to represent the city and its inhabitants in quiet moments glimpsed from narrow canals and second-story windows, he departed from the tradition of “vedute,” views of popular tourist spots such as San Marco and the Grand Canal. In the etchings, Whistler translates Venice’s vibrancy in a restricted palette of black, brown, white, and gray. He achieves striking atmospheric effects with his virtuosic graphic style — at times densely hatched, to suggest a shadowy recession, his use of line is elsewhere economical. Whistler later described these effects as “painting with exquisite line.” In the exhibition, three plein-air pastels provide a colorful counterpoint to the etchings.
