The wonders of Whistler

Whistler’s irenic waters of the Thames have received quite a splash with this major exhibition in Tate Britain on the banks of the river. “James McNeill Whistler” is hailed as the artist’s largest European retrospective in some three decades; it has received proportionate praise, as flamboyant as the artist himself. With some 150 pieces of work on display, including rarely seen sketches, there is much to shout about. For some, there will be a slight conflict in size versus intimacy, especially for those who attended the Royal Academy’s charming Whistler exhibition in 2022 (“Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan”). But it would be begrudging to grumble about the ambition of the Tate’s show, curated by Carol Jacobi; instead, it must be applauded. 

In 1855, at the age of twenty-one, Whistler (1834-1903) transplanted himself from the New World to the Old, establishing himself in Paris and later London. In Europe he absorbed the influences of the likes of Rembrandt, Velázquez and Turner, clearly seen in this exhibition. Emulation also led to inspiration, with Whistler in turn influencing Gwen John, Walter Sickert, Léon Spilliaert and others. The show thus reveals long threads of artistic development. Through the 1870s he eschewed traditional conventions, his room scenes, for example, being noticeably unencumbered with Victorian clutter. While he was a great innovator, perhaps he was not always as original as he liked to believe, joining the enthusiasm for Japonisme of the time, and to little positive effect: his work is not enhanced by it, adding little to the opening The Artist in His Studio (1865-6), the first of many famous paintings in which the show luxuriates. Here we are already pointing to Whistler’s series of “woman in white” masterpieces, Hiffernan being one of the two models painted. Whistler himself occupies the right-hand side of the canvas: a clever rather than self-effacing positioning. 

A room of early portraits follows. Here we are presented with the near certainty of his first portrait form: Head of a Peasant Woman from 1855-8, recent conservation research confirming it as the earliest surviving painting from his sojourn in Paris. Graphite drawing underneath guides the brushwork. The self-portrait Whistler Smoking (1856-60) loosens his style in a rawer manner, while carefully creating his bohemian artistic image; it conjures up Hemingway’s disapproving opinion of Wyndham Lewis’s attire as depicted in A Moveable Feast: sporting “a wide black hat […]  Lewis wore the uniform of a pre-war artist […] dressed like someone out of La Bohème.” The Pall Mall Gazette was way ahead of him, deriding Whistler’s “foppish airs and affectations.”

Elsewhere landscapes also show his development. Green and Grey, Channel (The Sea) (1865) clearly owes much to Gustave Courbet, alongside whom he worked, even as it moves from the latter’s realism. His best works of this decade are to be found in his Symphony in White series. Here we have Symphony in White, No.2 (1864) and No.3 (1865-7), but not, alas, the most striking of them all, No. 1 (1861-3). (All three were brought together for the RA exhibition.) These have the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood stamped all over them, down to the red hair of Hiffernan, most noticeably in No. 2, The Little White Girl. A melancholic, wistful figure is painted in front of a (white) fireplace and mirror. A splash of contrast to the white-on-white appears on one side of the painting, with a blue-and-white vase and fan (that Japonisme again) and, in the bottom right-hand corner, pink and purple flowers that have a lovely effect. The treatment of the white dress is evident of absolute mastery (most palpable of all in No. 1). No. 3 depicts two figures: the professional model Emelie Eyre Jones sits on the floor in yellow leaning on a white sofa, while a white-clad Hiffernan languishes upon it. As with No. 2, the colour is on the right hand-side of the painting as one views it. Whistler deemed it “the figure the purest I have done,” but the painting is inferior to the first two, with an air of Lawrence Alma-Tadema about it, sans his unrelenting classicism. 

It could be argued that Whistler’s work lacks emotional depth, but not with this painting

Whistler peaked in the 1870s, providing the show’s other standouts. One almost hesitates to reinforce the cliché that “Whistler’s Mother,” Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871) is his masterpiece; but it is. The single greatest achievement of the exhibition is the wall devoted to this one canvas. It is a revelation to see it thus. At its home in the Musée D’Orsay it is poorly hung: slotted in among other paintings and unaccommodating of the crowds around it blocking it from view. Here it breathes life. It could be argued that Whistler’s work lacks emotional depth, but not with this painting; perhaps that is one reason it is a firm favourite. Without doubt, this is the show’s highlight.

Overall, the exhibition, despite a sensible chronological ordering, seems to want for a more coherent and flowing arrangement. The last room, more dimly lit for the Nocturnes series, compensates. These Nocturnes, so named on the advice of Whistler’s patron Frederick Leyland, are wonderful and deeply atmospheric, as was their intent. Here the Japanese influence is more subtle, rendered in flat colours. London’s smoggy pollution becomes transformed into something more enchanting at hazy twilight “when”, declared Whistler, “the evening mists clothes the riverside with poetry […] and the tall chimneys become campanili – and the warehouses are palaces in the night.”

Arguably the best of these are Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (1871), Nocturne in Blue and Silver (1872-8) and Nocturne (1875-8). Both the languid movement of the water and, paradoxically, its stillness, are conveyed through long and broad ribbon-like strokes. The impact on Spilliaert is clear here. British artist and exact contemporary John Atkinson Grimshaw also took note. He and his friend Whistler had neighbouring studios in 1880s Chelsea. While Atkinson Grimshaw reverted to a form of Pre-Raphaelite hyper-realism, the atmosphere in many of his paintings is similar. Whistler confessed: “I considered myself the inventor of nocturnes until I saw Grimmy’s moonlit pictures.”

All this calm stillness only serves to underline the show’s one dreadful misstep. While proceeding happily along, one is suddenly accosted by a sudden torrent of angry noise from the next room. Is it a disgruntled viewer remonstrating with a museum attendant? Is there a deranged person around the corner threatening the viewing public with a knife? Or is it one of those irksome Just Stop Oil protesters about to deface a painting? None of the above. It is a film of an actor declaiming from Whistler’s famous “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” performative lecture, in which he amusingly defends the “art for art’s sake” philosophy of the Aesthetics Movement, for whom beauty and the response of the senses were what mattered, not Victorian didactic moralism. That the actor is one of Britain’s finest — Anton Lesser — doesn’t lessen the jarring impact of this intrusive amplification into what should be a reflective viewing experience. It is a well-intentioned but ill-conceived blunder.

The exhibition is accompanied by an excellent book of short essays edited by Jacobi, coincidentally published in the same month as Whistler’s Legacy, by Daniel E. Sutherland (Pennsylvania State University Press). The show moves to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam from October 16 until January 10, 2027.