Newly Authenticated Whistler Portrait Sheds Light on His Formative Years
By Jo Lawson-Tancred
New conservation research has verified James McNeill Whistler‘s earliest-known portrait, experts say. The exceptionally rare painting reveals the young artist during a crucial period of experimentation that would propel him to stardom as one of London’s most radical Victorian painters.
The pocket-sized painting, produced while Whistler was living in Paris during his early 20s, is included in a monumental survey of the American artist’s life and art at Tate Britain. There, it has been reunited with four more oil portraits from the same period, more than 120 years since they were last exhibited together. One highlight of the group is a previously unseen self-portrait of Whistler smoking from a private collection.
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For the first time, sketchbooks from Whistler’s teenage years are also being made public, further transforming our understanding of the artist’s early development. “The works just haven’t been shown since Whistler died,” said the show’s curator Carol Jacobi. “We decided it was really important to tell this story.”
James McNeill Whistler, Whistler Smoking (1856–60). Image courtesy Private Collection.
Whistler painted Head of a Peasant Woman sometime between 1855 and 1858. At this time, he had made his name as an etcher of urban scenes who had a knack for finding beauty in the everyday, and he was turning his attention towards bohemian friends and neighbors. This interest in realism was informed by the writings of French poet Charles Baudelaire and peers like Gustave Courbet, but Whistler was also an ardent admirer of Rembrandt. A painting like La Mère Gérard, also produced in around 1858, can in particular be connected to works like An Old Woman Reading (1655), by the 17th-century Dutch master, for taking as their subject a humble, elderly woman.
In his typically idiosyncratic way, Whistler innovated on these references to create something that felt fresh, and startlingly modern. “We see an artist who is using fast, dynamic brushstrokes to explore themes that, 15 years later, would be explored by the Impressionists,” said Jacobi.
Head of a Peasant Woman can be seen as a bridge between Whistler’s origins as a draughtsman and etcher and his adoption of paint, a medium that he would quickly master. An infrared analysis of the work has revealed that the application of paint closely follows the artist’s preparatory graphite drawing, while some of the shading has been scratched on in the manner of an etching.
James McNeill Whistler’s St Petersburg Sketchbook, p.6 (1844–48). Image: © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.
“It’s almost like he’s coloring in,” said Jacobi. “He quickly stops doing drawings underneath his paintings, drawing with his brush instead.”
Head of a Peasant Woman was included in a landmark memorial exhibition dedicated to Whistler in London in 1905, having surfaced in the collection of a family member. “No one had seen it before,” said Jacobi. “So it was quite a mystery.”
Over a century later, the painting was still subject to doubts about its origins and authenticity. After securing it as a loan from the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, Tate decided to investigate. The ensuing project, dubbed “Whistler’s Finish,” focused on a series of little-studied paintings from Whistler’s extensive online catalogue raisonné.
A thorough scientific analysis comparing the work with known Whistler canvases showed that it was a particularly early example, making it the first-known portrait painted by Whistler.
James McNeill Whistler, Wapping (1860-4). Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Whistler began experimenting with oil in the mid 1850s, shortly before he settled in London, where he would paint his first major canvases. Two of the most famous from this period, At the Piano (1858) and Wapping (1860–64), reveal the contrast between the conventional, bourgeois existence that Whistler was forced into while staying with this half-sister and her husband in West London, and his true aspiration to treat the East End’s docklands as a worthy subject for art. Both paintings are on view at Tate Britain.
Once Whistler gained real confidence working in paint, he went on to create some of his best-known masterpieces, including Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander and Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871), also known as Whistler’s Mother, now on view at Tate Britain.
“I hadn’t previously appreciated what a psychologically penetrating portraitist Whistler always was,” said Jacobi. “Every portrait in the exhibition is very individual. Even if, frustratingly, we don’t know who the peasant woman is, we get a strong sense of her personality.”
“James McNeill Whistler” is on view at Tate Britain on Millbank, London, through September 27.
This article was originally published by Artnet News.