Whistler’s Finish in his Portraits of Cicely and May Alexander

In the early 1870s James McNeill Whistler began work on a series of atmospheric evening and nighttime paintings of London, particularly of the River Thames and Chelsea. Alongside the development of his nocturnes, which were ‘personal’ experiments in tonal painting, the artist turned to the conventional and potentially lucrative practice of full-length portraiture commissions.1 His first full-length portrait, Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F.R. Leyland 1870–73 (YMSM 097; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington), was commissioned by his patron Frederick Leyland (1831–1892) and begun the year before Whistler completed the portrait of his mother, Anna Matilda McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (YMSM 101; Musée d’Orsay, Paris).2

It is significant that Whistler’s first nocturnes were painted while working on the portrait of his mother, as both portrait and landscapes heralded a radical change in his artistic development. This stemmed in part from the artist’s strong appreciation of the formal qualities of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e). From the 1850s Whistler had been an early enthusiast and collector of East Asian art and at the forefront of the growing fashion for japonisme among fellow artists and collectors. In his ‘Japanese’ paintings from the mid-1860s he had created his own Western vision of an Eastern culture by incorporating items from his collections: subjects dressed in Kimonos are surrounded by richly coloured, patterned carpets, fans, woodblock prints and porcelain.3 In the early 1870s he moved away from painting the objects themselves, towards incorporating their principles of design. His study of Japanese woodblock prints led to a simplification and abstraction of forms. He began to reduce his range of hues to create more subdued tonal harmonies.

Whistler was also influenced by contemporaries closer to home. Borrowing from the techniques of the painters Albert Moore (1841–1893) and Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904), he developed an original method to achieve his desired au premier coup finish: by increasing the fluidity of his paint, Whistler was able to work in thin layers, which he adjusted by rubbing or scraping away the paint in between applications, to maintain the impression of a single, final paint layer.4 The tops of the canvas weave remained visibly integrated into the aesthetic of his surface finish, an effect Joyce Hill Stoner has named ‘weavism’.5

William Cleverly Alexander, a collector of East Asian art and old master paintings, first saw the portrait of Whistler’s mother when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1872. Alexander had purchased Whistler’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea 1871 (YMSM 103; Tate T01571) the previous year and was so taken with the painting that he asked Whistler to paint his children and also offered Whistler his first interior design commission.6 Painting portraits of Alexander’s eldest children, Agnes Mary ‘May’ Alexander (1862–1950) and her younger sister Cicely Henrietta (1864–1932), supported the development of an emerging and closely related strand of Whistler’s practice: that of interior design and the concept of the total artwork. In both Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander 1872–3 (YMSM 129; Tate N04622; fig.1) and Miss May Alexander 1874–5 (YMSM 127; Tate N05964; fig.2) the subjects occupy an interior also designed by Whistler. Many scholars have seen Cicely’s portrait as the epitome of Whistler’s Japanese-influenced aestheticism.7

Whistler began painting eight-year-old Cicely in 1872, preferring to start with the ‘fair arrangement’, presumably in reference to her blond hair (fig.3).8 The portrait shows the young girl wearing a stiff white knee-length dress, white stockings and black shoes, her left leg pointing forwards in a ballet pose. In her left hand she holds a hat adorned with a large feather in muted yellow. She stands on a patterned matting against a plain grey wall with black panelling. At her right, a piece of fabric with golden tassels drapes over a piece of glossy black furniture. Butterflies and daisies float across the background. Her finished portrait was first exhibited at the Flemish Gallery, London, in 1874.9

May was twelve years old when her portrait was begun later in 1874, but unlike Cicely’s it was never finished. A carte de visite shows her at approximately the same age as she is in the painting (fig.4). In Whistler’s portrait May stands in front of a pale lilac-grey wall with a cream and black skirting board. Dressed in a grey riding habit, with long skirts falling to the floor, she is preparing to go out. She wears a wide brimmed black hat and gloves; one hand is raised while the other fastens the glove at her wrist. Light yellow patches on the wall suggest dappled sunlight. The matting at her feet contains some yellow stripes and to her right a large dark brown jar is filled with a cloud of small golden yellow blossoms. Correspondence shows that Whistler was working on the painting in March 1875, but progress halted when May contracted scarlet fever.10 At the time of Whistler’s bankruptcy in 1879 the painting was still not completed and it passed to his printer and creditor Thomas Way (1837–1915) before returning to Whistler eighteen years later ‘in a roll of large six-foot length portraits’.11 There is no evidence that Whistler worked on it further.

Throughout Whistler’s career, discussions of his painted surface and its degree of ‘finish’ dominated responses to his work. In 1898 Whistler noted that one reviewer had criticised Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander, hereafter Miss Cicely Alexander, in 1892, feeling it to be ‘a sketch, in which much must be imagined’.12 During the first and only known exhibition of May’s portrait during Whistler’s lifetime, in 1898, Whistler explained its unfinished condition to an independent critic in a letter, saying the painting was:

The subject of exhibiting an unfinished painting must have arisen, as Whistler continued somewhat defensively:

Questions surrounding ‘finish’ in art were also central to Whistler’s libel trial against the art critic John Ruskin in 1878. Whistler took legal action following Ruskin’s highly critical review of a group of his portraits and nocturnes shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1877. He accused Whistler of being a ‘coxcomb’ by asking for two hundred guineas for ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public's face’, thereby attacking Whistler’s artistic integrity.14 At the trial, a lack of finish in the artist’s more experimental portraits from the later 1870s was similarly criticised.15 In defence of Ruskin, Tom Taylor, an art critic and the editor of Punch, wrote: ‘Mr Whistler’s full-length arrangements suggest to us a choice between materialised spirits and figures in a London fog … all Mr Whistler’s work is unfinished. It is sketchy’.16

This article examines the concept of finish in relation to recent research and material analysis of the two Alexander portraits, undertaken at the same time as the conservation treatment of the portrait of May.17 Comparison between the qualities of a finished and an unfinished painting provides insight into Whistler’s working practice. Although it is only possible to speculate how Whistler might have completed May’s portrait under different circumstances, technical analysis indicates that, despite a similarity in date and subject, the two portraits show substantially different approaches from the outset. Even if Whistler had worked on May’s portrait further, its final appearance, in terms of design and surface finish, is likely to have remained quite different to Cicely’s. The analysis shows that Whistler’s materials and working methods have determined the differences in surface finish between the two portraits.

In technical and stylistic terms both portraits can be seen as transitional works: they refer back to his earlier works as well as anticipating later developments. Their design is closely intertwined with the decorative schemes that became a vital part of his wider practice at this time, shifting his concept of a total aesthetic ‘finish’ beyond a painting’s physical parameters.

In the intervening years between painting May’s portrait and exhibiting it, the growing public appreciation of Whistler’s art brought about a greater acceptance of his atmospheric and abstracted style of painting, considered so radical in the 1870s. In exhibiting May’s portrait in 1898, perhaps Whistler came to value the qualities inherent in its unfinished condition and so felt content to exhibit it as it was. Since this exhibition, however, the painting’s appearance has undoubtedly changed. Tate archival records show that by 1941, May’s portrait was in poor condition. Helmut Ruhemann was a restorer at the National Gallery and responsible for the conservation treatment of Tate Gallery paintings during the second World War, from 1939–45. He noted that the paint was very thin and flaking, concluding that its appearance was due both to Whistler’s methods of rubbing down and changes caused by ageing or damage.18 The canvas was noted to be ‘rotten, very thin and full of holes’.19 Ruhemann lined the canvas using a wax-resin adhesive to consolidate the paint and the canvas, before removing varnish and retouching losses.20 In his 1960s treatment, the Tate conservator Percy Williams noted several large areas of bare canvas around the bottom of the skirt, likely caused by flaking paint and Ruhemann’s subsequent lining process, as much as Whistler’s technique (fig.5). He also found some of Ruhemann’s retouchings to be impossible to remove.21 Technical analysis confirms the presence of materials consistent with those documented to have been used in these twentieth century treatments.22

Design

According to his friends and biographers Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, Whistler insisted a painter make ‘the wall upon which his work hung, the room containing it, the whole house, a Harmony, a Symphony, an Arrangement, as perfect as the picture or print which became a part of it’.23 His conception of the total work of art was uniquely visual: it was the ‘painter’s poetry’.24 His aesthetic designs fitted with his theory of painting, which he described to a friend in a letter of 1873 as ‘The science of color and “picture pattern”’.25 Just as he meticulously balanced colour, tone and line on his canvas, so he arranged every decorative element of his interiors into a unified scheme.

Whistler favoured a Japanese-influenced interior aesthetic of spatial clarity and restraint – one that stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing taste for heavy furniture and patterned wallpapers associated with the revivalist naturalism of the Morris company.26 He had a unique appreciation for ‘plain distempered walls and painted woodwork. Japanese matting on the floor, plain curtains hanging in straight folds’ and opted for light, delicate pieces of furniture.27 He mixed the modulated colours and tones for the interior paints he used in his houses, and against these arranged his growing collection of East Asian objects: Japanese prints in thin, simple frames, scroll paintings, screens, groups of fans mounted on the wall and Chinese ceramics displayed on shelves.28

Cicely’s portrait is one of a small group of paintings – among them Whistler’s portrait of his mother – set in the artist’s studio at 2 Lindsey Row in Chelsea (now 96 Cheyne Walk), London. The cool palette of grey tones in these works is derived from the studio’s black wainscoting – panelling on the lower portion of a wall – and grey walls, also designed by Whistler.29 It was Alexander’s appreciation of the decor at Lindsey Row that led him to commission Whistler to devise decorative schemes for his new residence, Aubrey House in Kensington, London. Cicely’s portrait may have been nearing completion when the Alexander family moved there in the autumn of 1873. Whistler was to design the reception rooms, where Alexander planned to display his collections.

Whistler’s sketches for Aubrey House feature some of the ideas already seen in Lindsey Row and in his painting of Cicely. The matting on which Cicely stands was a studio prop, its chequered black and grey design reportedly made directly on the floor in black and white tape, by the sisters of Whistler’s pupils and studio assistants Walter and Henry Greaves.30 This may have inspired the rug design made for Aubrey House in stripes of cream and yellow (fig.6).31 The simple, glossy black chair at the left of Cicely’s portrait shows similarities with the stick-like chairs and other furniture Whistler sketched for the display of Alexander’s ceramics. These designs also show plain, compartmentalised walls, echoing the horizontal dado rail and vertical black panel that divide the wall in Cicely’s portrait, and referencing the interiors he had seen in Japanese woodblock prints.32

While Whistler’s elaborate scheme for Aubrey House was not carried out in full, he painted the walls and woodwork. In a series of gouache studies that he produced for the walls and wainscoting, his dining room colour scheme balances horizontal bands of lilac-grey, blue, creams and gold. One study shows dabs of gold decorating the wall above the wainscoting (fig.7).33 These echo his redecoration of his own staircase at the time of Cicely’s sittings, designs for which include flowers, or perhaps petals, delicately floating on the wall above a gold dado.34 A similar design can be found in the daisies and citron butterflies that appear in Cicely’s portrait, illustrating the fluidity with which Whistler transposed ideas between his canvases and his decorative schemes.

Whistler drew inspiration from a variety of different artists and styles. The influence of Diego Velázquez and Édouard Manet has been discussed widely in relation to Cicely’s portrait.35 He is known to have owned photographic reproductions of Velázquez’s work, including Las Meninas 1656 (Museo del Prado, Madrid).36 Cicely’s portrait can be seen as a direct homage to the painting, which centres on a young blond girl wearing an elaborate stiff white dress adorned with ribbons and rosettes. Thomas Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly c.1756 (National Gallery, London) is another possible inspiration.37 Set against a dark background, two young girls dressed in golden yellow, grey and white run to catch a white butterfly, their pose balletic, each with outstretched, pointed toes. The influence of prints such as Torii Kiyonaga’s Winter Scene with Ladies on a Balcony and in the Garden 1784–95 (The Hunterian, University of Glasgow) can be seen in all of Whistler’s portraits of this period.38 There is a lightness of touch achieved by his restrained palette: muted, gradated harmonies of colour fill ordered spaces, with large areas sharing the same colour. A flattened perspective places his sitters in a shallow space with the floors tilted upwards, and strong asymmetrical compositional lines divide the spaces. Whistler also used carefully placed decorative floral motifs in both portraits, a common feature in many Japanese woodblock prints.

The novelist Violet Hunt, a friend of the Alexander family, played at Aubrey House as a child. She recalls ‘rooms decorated by Whistler in pale, pure colours, in which ‘the mouldings around the doors and so on were carried out carefully in many gradations of white’.39 Whistler’s scheme might have survived until 1913 when structural changes were made to the building.40 May’s portrait gives us a rare visual record of his design for the drawing room. Recent conservation treatment has made clearer the pale lilac-grey of the wall, a tone resembling the wall colour in his sketches for the Aubrey House dining room.41 This had been obscured for many years. By the time of the exhibition James McNeill Whistler at Tate Britain, London, in 1994–5, varnish had become yellowed and restorations discoloured, distorting the cool tonality of the painting. However, the sensitivity of the paint surface precluded treatment at that time, using traditional methods of swab rolling.42 Through the recent development of cleaning techniques using the microfilament tissue Evolon, a method was found during the recent treatment for the safe removal of upper layers of varnish (see fig.12).43

To these lilac-grey walls, Whistler added floating flecks of pale yellow on the wall within the painting, which might suggest dappled sunlight from the south-facing windows.44 Already, a shift between the two paintings was underway: while Cicely’s portrait incorporates selected elements of Whistler’s existing studio surroundings, May’s painting incorporates the interior in which the painting was intended to hang. This doubling emphasises the relationship between a painting and its surrounding interior design, a concept Whistler would further develop in The Peacock Room 1876–7 (YMSM 178; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington), the interior scheme he created for Leyland’s home at 49 Princes Gate.45

Both Whistler and Alexander conceived of interior decoration chiefly as the means to display artworks to their best advantage. In April 1874, the year Whistler began the portrait of May, he hired and redecorated the Flemish Gallery in Pall Mall for his first solo exhibition in London. To promote his commitment to a total aesthetic environment, he designed every aspect of the display, including its simple exhibition catalogue. This show was the first of several ventures that heralded a new, modern method of displaying artworks. Paintings were given space, hung in one or two sight lines, contrasting with the conventional Victorian gallery hang, where pictures covered the entire wall.46

In preparing for exhibitions, he took immense care to preside over the restoration, finish and presentation of his artworks, aware that accumulated dirt and yellowed varnishes would have a direct visual impact, upsetting the carefully constructed colour and tonal relationships within his paintings.47 Correspondence shows he regularly pressured owners to have their paintings cleaned and revarnished or reframed in advance of exhibitions to ensure consistent quality and harmony across the works on display.48

Just as he later designed colour schemes for the walls of his clients’ homes, the Flemish gallery was decorated as a ‘domestic’ space for the display of more than one hundred artworks, including all his full-length portraits of the early 1870s.49 His chosen scheme of pinkish-grey walls with white wainscoting echoed his own drawing room in Lindsey Row, visible in Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland 1871–4 (YMSM 106; Frick Collection, New York).50 He even incised that painting’s flat, gilded frame with a basketweave pattern, mirroring the design on the floor matting within the painting and that within the gallery itself, thereby creating a continuous aesthetic ensemble.51

Whistler was meticulous in overseeing every detail at the Flemish Gallery. His decorator Frederick Fox had to repaint the wall’s light pink in a greyish tone following a complaint from the artist. The ceiling was painted brown and another room primrose yellow.52 One reviewer deemed the gallery ‘A symphony in colour’ and Whistler’s sensitivity to colour and harmony as ‘born of the Japanese’.53 Another described ‘glaring yellow striped matting in two shades’ and blue and white vases containing ‘yellow calceolaria flowers’.54

In May’s portrait the only decorative object in the painting is a vase filled with yellow flowers – also likely to be calceolaria, or slipper flower – that contrast with the lilac-grey walls. The flowers spill out of the deep brown glazed vase, which appears to be a Martaban jar and is likely from Alexander’s collection.55 The jar was an unusual departure from Whistler’s more frequent visualisations of his own blue and white porcelains in his paintings of the mid-1860s.56 Alexander, a prolific collector of different types of Chinese ceramics might have specified a ‘portrait’ of a favourite large jar.57 Equally, its rich brown glazes must have appealed to Whistler for this particular colour harmony; echoing his introduction of brown ceilings to compliment the pinkish grey walls, yellow flowers and matting in the Flemish Gallery exhibition. In painting the jar, he abstracted any pictorial designs there might have been on its surface, instead promoting its formal qualities to simplify his overall design.58 The jar’s rich translucent glazes might also have inspired Whistler in his use of thin drips of paint.

Dress

Both May’s and Cicely’s portraits incorporate Whistler’s carefully curated interiors, demonstrating a flow of ideas between the designs on the canvas and a physical environment. The sitter’s attire was also a crucial part of Whistler’s overall design and received scrupulous attention. For Cicely, he requested a dress of ‘fine muslin … The dress might have frills on the skirts and about it – and a fine little ruffle for the neck – or else lace … Also it might be looped up from time to time with bows of pale yellow ribbon’. He gave precise instructions for its laundering and for the hue of the fabric specifying:

Sketches for the portrait of Cicely centre on the dress and helped convey Whistler’s ideas to her parents.60 They show Whistler laying out his composition and colour scheme in pastel, in one adding touches of yellow throughout, thus mirroring the golden accents in the painting (fig.8).

Whistler decided on a large ‘picture hat’ for both girls – he liked the association with old master portraits, particularly those by Gainsborough. 61 His instructions for May’s hat were accompanied by a pen sketch recommending a shop that had ‘charming felt hats, and feather “picture hats”’. The size was important, too: it was to be ‘large … with a big soft brim – looped up … the feather swooping grandly away! … Don’t be afraid of having it too big’.62

There are two or possibly three extant sketches for Miss May Alexander, one of which was sent in the letter to her mother (fig.9a).63 May was painted in a riding habit at her parents’ request.64 Her clothing anticipates Whistler’s later portraits of women in graceful outdoor attire, conveying, by their pose, a sense of purposeful movement. In Arrangement in Black, No. 8: Portrait of Mrs Cassatt 1883–5 (YMSM 250; private collection), he replicates May’s action of pulling on gloves.

Sketches for May’s portrait include details that were not carried through into the final painting, showing that Whistler gradually refined and simplified his design (fig.9b). Buttons on her dress as well as a riding crop – a short, lightweight whip – were initially sketched and then painted but later removed, the latter’s position still visible in the infrared reflectogram (IRR) (fig.10). While painting, a ribbon was removed from the hat and the brim was reduced in size (fig.11). Whistler made these adjustments by scraping down the paint and painting over it with the pale yellow used elsewhere across the wall. While painting he continued to simplify May’s silhouette, straightening the more flamboyant sway of her hips seen in the sketch (see fig.9a). In this way he simplified and integrated figure, costume and interior decor into a pared-back whole.

The portrait of Miss May Alexander reflects a transitional moment in Whistler’s practice. The carefully curated interiors with artfully arranged props had begun to disappear from his paintings in the early 1870s. Curtains and framed pictures on the wall are gradually omitted in his portraits of his mother, painted in 1871, and of the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle, painted in 1872–3.65 In subsequent portraits, Whistler moved away from incorporating overtly aesthetic domestic interiors completely, exploring instead the atmospheric tonal effects of the curtained backdrops of his studio. The development of Whistler’s portrait of Leyland and his Arrangement in Black, No. 2: Portrait of Mrs Louis Huth 1872–3; private collection), anticipates this direction: sketches for the paintings show that Whistler initially conceived a more decorative interior background for both, but subsequently settled on a more pared-back, tonal setting.66

Canvas and ground

The printer and lithographer Thomas Robert Way (1861–1913) described the variety of Whistler’s canvas supports as ‘sometimes … of the coarsest sacking, at other times as thin and smooth as unglazed calico’.67 For the Alexander commission, he selected two very different supports, despite the paintings being close in date and of a similar size. Cicely was painted on a plain fine-weave canvas (averaging 17.7 x 20 threads per centimetre), while a much coarser and heavier weave was chosen for May’s portrait (averaging 10.8 x 9.1 threads per centimetre).68

Following the preparation of the canvas with a glue size – a thin layer typically consisting of animal glue used to seal the canvas – a ground layer was applied in the studio, by either Whistler or the Greaves brothers.69 Walter Greaves recalled that Miss Cicely Alexander was painted on a ‘distemper ground’.70 Staining tests on a cross-section of paint taken from the portrait indicates protein in the ground layer; however, since the painting was glue-paste lined in 1947–8 – a process by which a new canvas is attached on the reverse of the original canvas with a glue-paste adhesive – it is not possible to know whether this represents a glue-based paint medium, such as distemper, or migrated lining adhesive.71

Technical studies at the Art Institute of Chicago have shown the significant extent to which Whistler’s choice of ground colour impacted his desired finish across all media.72 The ground in Cicely’s portrait is dark grey, consisting of lead white, chalk, carbon black, traces of earth pigments and fine bone black. Designed to achieve a unifying base, it forms ‘the dominant note of the picture’ and affects the perception of colour throughout.73 In thinner areas of paint, the ground shows through, cooling and darkening the tone; whereas, thicker areas of paint, such as the white of highlights of the dress, obscure the ground and so are perceived as comparatively warmer and brighter.74

In contrast, for May’s portrait, Whistler chose a thin, white ground. It also plays an active role in the final appearance, shining through thin areas of paint in the pale lilac wall and lending the painting a lighter tonality overall. The only evidence of underdrawing in either painting is a few fine, black painted outlines positioning May’s neck and chin.75

Palette

Whistler prepared his paints and brushes with care, as he had learned in the mid-1850s in the Parisian studio of Charles Gleyre (1806–1874).76 His surviving palettes accord with several contemporaries’ accounts of his practice.77 He described black as his ‘universal harmoniser’, as taught by Gleyre, and for both portraits his restricted selection of pigments and their recurrence across the painting surface provides a subdued overall harmony of colour and tone.78 All areas sampled in both portraits show mixtures of lead white and bone black in varying proportions, tinted with small amounts of this limited range of pigments.79 In Cicely’s portrait this includes cadmium yellow and orange, cobalt blue, earth pigments and rose madder. Zinc white and strontium yellow were also found, although only in the butterflies.80

Unlike the painting of Cicely, May’s portrait was never given a musical title by Whistler, perhaps because it was not finished, yet it has a similarly narrow range of pigments and subdued harmony of tones. Its appearance in 1898 led one reviewer to use such a term, as he described: ‘a graceful figure in grey … marvellously cool and … silvery in tone … a harmony in grey and gold’.81 Recent conservation has gone some way to recovering its original cool tonality, although remnants of early, degraded varnish layers are still present (figs.12 and 13).

In addition to a variety of red, yellow and brown earth pigments, Whistler used cobalt blue, vermilion, red lakes and cadmium yellow. Thus, a small quantity of red lake, cobalt blue and bone black pigments combine in a matrix of lead white to make the lilac tones of the wall. Cadmium yellow is key to this painting. It is used for the flowers and pale yellows threaded through the carpet and across the wall.82 Mixed with greys, it lends a cool olive cast to May’s attire. Its opaque, brighter hue combines with more translucent natural yellow ochres and synthetic iron oxide pigments in a warm, semi-opaque glaze that tones the yellow matting and the brown glaze of the pot.

Whistler prescribed the position of the subject within the frame, stating it should be ‘equal to the distance at which the painter sees his model’.83 A tabletop palette and an array of very long-handled brushes were practical aids in keeping this distance.84 Contemporaries often described Whistler’s painting action as he constantly darted back and forth from the easel, working up the whole design simultaneously, ‘in one wet’, on a full-length canvas.85

Painting technique

Walter Sickert (1860–1942), Whistler’s studio assistant and pupil from 1882, said the artist’s paintings

In the portraits of Cicely and May we see a great variation of technique and manipulation of the paint by Whistler to produce his intended surface effects.

As an unfinished painting, Miss May Alexander perhaps gives us greater insight into Whistler’s initial stages of painting. The background wall and floor were first brushed on in two blocks of grey, the lilac tone forming the wall, with a small reserve – an area left unpainted – for the figure. Large brushes and fluid paint were necessary in a process akin to decorating a wall, as the painter Mortimer Menpes (1855–1938) recalled, having assisted Whistler in the early 1880s.87

May was initially laid in with wide, blunt-ended brushes in dark grey. Whistler’s first brushstrokes are visible in the painting’s least finished area, where the skirt’s hem fades to a light sketch of broad, horizontal marks, broken up by extensive scraping back. The excess of fabric at May’s right, swept around from the back of the dress, remains barely sketched in. Whistler used smaller brushes to define details such as the collar and sleeves, and he painted May’s raised hands over the touch-dry background in a sketchy, blurring effect that was not worked up but which successfully conveys the motion of her pulling on her gloves (fig.14).

Menpes related how Whistler ‘worked in clean and firm sweeps … to bring the background up to a figure … [and] with a large brush well pressed into the canvas would draw the line confidently’.88 In the background of Cicely’s portrait, although it is worked to a uniform final finish, the infrared reflectogram (IRR) shows sketchy patches of thicker paint around the figure, particularly the head, as Whistler reworked this area significantly during painting. In many places, the background paint has also been brought in over the dress or figure as he worked to readjust her contours (fig.15).

Whistler famously wrote in his ‘Propositions No. 2’ of 1884: ‘The work of the master reeks not of the sweat of the brow – suggests no effort – and is finished from the beginning.’89 However, evidence shows us the substantial effort Whistler took to achieve an au premier coup finish. Later in life Cicely recalled multiple sittings for her portrait, as many as seventy, during which she was required to stand still as Whistler worked, rubbed down and reworked.90 Inevitably this technique of erasure tried the patience of his other sitters, too, as Cicely’s experience is echoed in accounts spanning Whistler’s career.91

Whistler made many adjustments to Cicely’s figure. The position of her hand appears to have been changed more than once, a faint ghost of a finger remaining visible to the right of the current position. The X-radiograph indicates that Cicely’s head was originally larger and situated higher on the canvas. It also shows that size of Cicely’s torso was narrowed significantly, particularly along her left side (fig.16). Since Whistler rubbed down his paint, some alterations can be challenging to interpret in technical images; however, it is possible that Cicely’s hands were originally folded across her front, as in the earliest chalk sketch for the composition (see fig.8a).92 The IRR makes clear that the feather in Cicely’s hat was enlarged: originally it seems to have extended over only her right leg (fig.15).

Whistler varied his technique across Cicely’s portrait, just as he harmonised his colours. His manipulation of successive veils of paint, partially wiped back, results in complex tonal layering, with each thin layer contributing to the surface effect. Whistler’s techniques in Cicely’s portrait include scumbling in the floor matting, whereby the lighter-coloured paint was sufficiently dry when applied for it to ‘skip’ across the texture of the canvas weave, revealing the darker tones beneath. In the chequered pattern, each dab of the brush includes bright flecks of blue, red or orange, perhaps made by the edge of a brush picking up minute amounts of pure, unmixed colour from the palette. Similar flecks of colour were also used in the dress, despite Whistler’s precise instruction that the real dress should include ‘not an atom of blue’.93 Even the butterflies have each been rendered using a slightly different technique (fig.17).94

Visible in Cicely’s face are traces of multiple different pink layers indicating that Whistler repeatedly worked this area, wiping or rubbing it back while the paint was still wet. Such techniques play a fundamental role in the lightness and delicacy of the painting’s finish. His process of purposefully rubbing away to reveal darker underlayers contributes to this delicate effect, as can be seen in Cicely’s eyes and in Whistler’s rendering of the translucency of the fabrics draped over the chair. As a result, the paint layers are extremely thin in areas such as Cicely’s dress. However, rarely is the paint rubbed back to the degree that the bare canvas is exposed as in the portrait of May.95

In contrast to Cicely’s, May’s face is very thinly painted and has been wiped or scraped down heavily to show the raw canvas to a degree not seen in many other paintings, suggesting Whistler might have been intending to continue to work on the portrait. With a white underlayer, the modelling used to define her features was applied over the pale flesh tone in opaque lilac-greys, darker pinks, creams and semi-translucent brown shadows. May’s eyes are flat and black, without the highlights seen in Cicely’s (fig.18).

In both portraits, the still life elements of the interiors are rendered more succinctly than the figures, and with apparent ease. In Cicely’s, the fabric on the chair was painted in a single application of long, fluid, ‘ribbon’ brushstrokes, reminiscent of those Whistler frequently used in his paintings in the late 1860s.96 In May’s, the ceramic pot appears to be the most ‘finished’ part of the painting. Whistler painted its cloud of blossoms in small, thick dabs of yellow with precise brush marking, a technique also seen in the late 1860s.97

In May’s portrait, Whistler thinned his paint in a way not seen in Cicely’s portrait. This parallels the development of his nocturnes in the early 1870s. For example, in Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Southampton Water 1872 (YMSM 117; Art Institute of Chicago) Whistler painted with thin, broad washes of very dilute paint, blending his tones to create indistinct shapes on the water in the gathering dusk. The paint is diluted to the point where the smooth flat surface shows little evidence of brushmarking.98

For May’s dress he applied similarly fluid paint in successive, sweeping strokes, forming its folds with pale olive high points that recede to whisper-thin washes over dark bluish greys. Between successive layers, while this paint was still wet or touch-dry, Whistler rubbed or scraped down the surface to reveal the tops of the canvas weave. This weavism is visible across the entire surface but particularly in exceptionally thinly painted passages of the dress (fig.19). Because the painting was interrupted, we cannot know how Whistler might have continued to work up these areas, if at all, but varnish removed during recent conservation treatment has brought us closer to the original surface of these fluid films of thinned paint as Whistler left them.

Whistler diluted his paint with thinning agents to create a medium he called his ‘sauce’.99 For this process, his contemporaries referred to his use of turpentine and drying oils, such as linseed, or of resins such as mastic or copal.100 Such mixtures would have allowed him to achieve his desired fluidity while maintaining a degree of paint saturation.101 Medium analysis of paint samples taken from both portraits identified drying oil and Pinaceae resin. The Pinaceae resin could be indicative of the use of turpentine as a paint diluent, but it could equally originate from applied varnish layers.

Very fluid paint provided Whistler with a smooth, levelled surface, erasing evidence of brushmarks and thus signs of labour. His foregrounding of the regular patterning conferred by the pale, raw canvas tops enhances this flattening effect by disrupting illusions of depth in a manner reminiscent of Japanese paintings on silk or woodblock prints. It brings the materiality of the canvas to the surface, both unifying the overall tonality and giving an ethereal quality to Whistler’s finish.

Thomas R. Way described Whistler diluting his paint with turpentine until it was ‘almost as thin as water’ and ‘ran down in streaks’.102 In May’s portrait, drips and runs in translucent browns replicate the glazes he would have seen in the ceramic Martaban jar. Another, more substantial row of drips is visible through the translucent yellow-grey wash that tones the matting. Whistler chose to touch out some of these drips with bright cadmium yellow, repurposing their shapes to describe glints of gold in the matting, a ‘reflection’ of the yellow blossoms (fig.20). Opaque yellow dots of flowers pool into the liquid, their edges spreading like watercolour on thick paper. Similar effects of fluid paint would be seen in Whistler’s expressive watercolours of the later 1870s (fig.21).103

Whistler had integrated one or two drips for specific pictorial effects when painting the earlier portraits of Thomas Carlyle and Mrs Frances Leyland.104 In tandem with his nocturnes of the later 1870s, he pushed the boundaries of fluidity in paint in more personal portraits to develop a new aesthetic. As Erma Hermens and Arie Wallert point out in their study of Arrangement in Yellow and Grey: Effie Deans (YMSM 183; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Whistler’s interest was in technical experiment rather than ‘finish’.105 Indeed, in his libel trial against Ruskin Whistler defended his paintings’ apparent lack of ‘finish’, explaining ‘These were impressions of my own. I make them my study … to appeal to none but those who may understand the technical matter’.106

Conclusion

In the early 1870s Whistler’s full-length portraits as well as his concepts of interior design were informed by aesthetic principles derived from Japanese art. His representations of Cicely and May Alexander were each integrated into a simplified decorative surface with carefully positioned motifs, using low-key colour tones rhythmically repeated across the painting to create an overall harmony, and this is evident both in the finished and unfinished surfaces. His interior designs expanded this to an immersive scale. The careful positioning of artworks in such curated spaces offered viewers a complete aesthetic experience, as Whistler’s overall ‘finish’ incorporated everything within their field of vision.

The simplicity and spaciousness of Whistler’s interiors was original and radically different from the clutter of pictures and furniture prevalent in nineteenth-century domestic spaces and exhibitions. For the Flemish Gallery exhibition in 1874, Whistler stated his aim to ‘prove that the place in which works of art are shown may be made as free from “discordant elements which distract the spectator’s attention” as the works themselves’.107 Between painting the portrait of his mother in 1871 and the portrait of May in 1874, the reciprocity of these two aspects of his practice reached a new height. Whistler not only decorated the room in which Miss May Alexander was intended to hang; he also depicted the room in her portrait. It was, however, to be a brief focus: by the later 1870s, he had moved on.

Sickert wrote in 1910 that ‘None of Whistler’s paintings were finished … They were left off – which is another thing – sometimes by force of circumstances, sometimes because he could do nothing more to them’.108 That May’s portrait was ‘left off’ allows us a glimpse into the earlier stages of Whistler’s painting process. Both portraits show a wide variety of effects as Whistler manipulated his paint to achieve his intended surface finish. Although they are close in date, Cicely’s portrait employs very different techniques from May’s, illustrating the way in which Whistler’s stylistic development relied on continual technical experimentation. In May’s portrait his use of paint washes – ‘thinned … into an imitation of the gouache delicacy proper to a Kakemono’ – provided new ways of translating his aesthetic vision onto canvas.109

Whistler continued to develop his approach to his full-length portraits, finding a growing affinity with the atmospheric and ephemeral visions of Chelsea seen in his nocturnes. In material and stylistic terms, he moved towards a greater simplicity and abstraction of form in the latter years of the 1870s. This trajectory can already be detected by comparing these two portraits. While unfinished, May’s portrait looks towards more experimental studies to come.