Whistler’s Friendships as Seen through His Surfaces

Having examined and treated a number of paintings by James McNeill Whistler in the 1970s, I noticed that when seen by raking light, most of his works on canvas from the early 1870s until his death in 1903 are distinguished by an overall visible canvas weave uninterrupted by brushstrokes. In 1980 I happened to be looking at still life paintings by Henri Fantin-Latour (1836–1904) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and I immediately sensed a kinship between Fantin-Latour’s work and paintings by Whistler after 1870, particularly in the canvas weave visible through in the paint surfaces (figs.1 and 2). I wondered then whether the two artists had known each other. Subsequently, I learned they were good friends and were part of a trio named the Société des Trois. From this, I postulated that Whistler’s surfaces might reveal insights into his friendships and wrote my dissertation about what I was discovering as a conservator practicing ‘close looking’.1

In 1864 Fantin-Latour included Whistler in his group portrait of artists and writers Hommage à Delacroix (fig.3). Clustered in a triangle at the centre-left of the picture are Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), Whistler and Fantin-Latour. All three artists admired Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) and imitated his brushwork and palette in the late 1850s and early 1860s. In 1858 they gave their friendship a label: the Société des Trois. I next noted that the three artists were closest when the facture of their work was similar, and as their techniques grew dissimilar, their friendship cooled. Whistler’s and Fantin-Latour’s friendship continued, off and on, until the 1890s, when both became close to the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898). This article considers the influence on Whistler’s paintings of his friendships with Fantin-Latour and Legros as well as the older Courbet. It also charts in Whistler’s surfaces his relationships in later years with a range of artists including Mallarmé, the painter Albert Moore (1841–1893) and the architect Edward William Godwin (1833–1886).

In the last decade of his life, Whistler’s paintings were influenced by his devotion to his wife, the artist Beatrice ‘Beatrix’ Whistler (1857–1896), and conversations with the collector Charles Lang Freer (1854–1919). After Beatrix died of cancer, a painting Whistler had promised Freer, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl 1894–1903 (YMSM 421; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington), hereafter Little Blue Girl, was never finished.2 His trademark technique had been to scrape down his vertical portraits between multiple superimpositions to achieve what I have referred to as his ‘one skin’ surface, but the Little Blue Girl retained the many layers, which had wrinkled and shrivelled as a result.3 Whistler revealed his grief in letters to Freer and asked his patron to ‘read’ the surface of the painting. This article takes up and extends Whistler’s challenge by attempting to ‘read’ the artist’s wider experiences and relationships through the surfaces of his work.

Courbet, Fantin-Latour and Legros

Whistler first met Fantin-Latour in Paris in 1858, while copying François Boucher’s Diana at the Bath 1742 (Musée du Louvre, Paris) at the Louvre.4 During their long friendship, which is documented in multiple letters spanning three decades, Whistler settled on his trademark style of leaving the canvas weave visible, which I have termed ‘weavism’.5 Both artists continued to use this technique until their respective deaths. Also in 1858, Fantin-Latour introduced Whistler to Courbet. Whistler’s early biographers, Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, reported that Whistler and Fantin-Latour joined a group that went to the studio of François Bonvin to work under the direction of Courbet.6 Whistler would likely have admired the artist’s surfaces, which followed the precedent set by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), whose loose, painterly brushstrokes departed from academic orthodoxy. One year earlier, at the Musée du Luxembourg, Whistler had copied Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s Roger Freeing Angelica 1819 (Musée du Louvre, Paris).7 This oil painting shows Whistler’s awareness of the nineteenth-century dichotomy of the smooth academic finish typical of paintings by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) in contrast to the visible brushstrokes in paintings by Courbet or Delacroix; in his copy, Whistler combined a smooth, or ‘licked’ surface with some visible brushwork.

Begun the following year, Whistler’s La Mère Gérard 1858–9 (YMSM 026; fig.4) displays the low-relief topography and assertive manipulation of paint typical of Courbet, who used thick paint and palette knives to create textured surfaces. In 1861 a review in the Daily Telegraph of La Mère Gérard at the Royal Academy Exhibition opined that Whistler used ‘mud and clay on his palette’.8 From 1860 to 1864 Whistler’s brushwork and manipulation of the palette knife became even more similar to Courbet’s facture.

One of the sitters in Whistler’s early Wapping 1861–4 (YMSM 035; fig.5) is Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), who had moved to London in the early 1860s. Along with Fantin-Latour, the artist was a close friend of Whistler’s and a founding member of the Société des Trois. During the 1860s Legros abandoned his Courbet-like dark, low-relief surfaces and adopted ‘archaic techniques’, and correspondence between Fantin-Latour and Whistler between 1862 and 1869 features increasingly disgruntled comments about Legros and his paintings.9 In April 1863 Fantin-Latour wrote to Whistler that Legros now admired the Primitives – a term used at the time to describe Italian painters working c.1180–1400 – Holbein and German artists.10 In his painting Cupid and Psyche 1867 (Tate N03274), for instance, Legros applied a chromium oxide green imprimatura or underlayer, a technique used by ‘primitive’ artists that would have seemed antithetical to the ‘modern’ techniques of Whistler, Fantin-Latour or Courbet.11 In August 1865 Whistler wrote to Fantin ’I scarcely ever see Legros - I am beginning to think that there is nothing left of my former interest in him’, and two months later the painter Albert Moore was nominated to replace Legros in the Société des Trois.12 In the 1870s Legros and Whistler grew apart. Legros’s techniques became increasingly academic, with his paintings eventually achieving the licked surface associated with the Royal Academicians George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) and Frederic Leighton (1878–1898). Legros’s Rehearsing the Service c.1870 (Tate N03135) is exemplary of these techniques, with its smooth finish and realistically painted religious figures with sharp focus.

Whistler, Courbet and Joanna Hiffernan

Whistler’s termination of his relationship with his romantic partner and model Joanna ‘Jo’ Hiffernan (1843–1886) in the mid-1860s coincided with his rejection of Courbet. Hiffernan first appears alongside Legros in Wapping. Next, she modelled for Whistler in The White Girl 1861–3, retitled in 1867 Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl (YMSM 038; fig.6), a full-length portrait of her wearing a white dress. Whistler altered the painting sometime between 1870 and 1875.13 This painting is technically dissimilar to Whistler’s other works from the early 1860s, with the artist apparently having scraped down areas of thick, impasted oil paint that had been applied a full decade earlier. A transmitted light photograph taken during technical examination of The White Girl reveals that the face, left hand and areas of the dress were scraped down well after the paint had dried and solidified, causing the canvas fibres to become thinned and tattered and even resulting in a tear in the face (fig.7).14 Today The White Girl features Courbet-like rich, viscous, impastoed paint throughout most of the canvas but with an anomalous slick, smooth surface in the face and proper left hand, areas that were repainted. As a result, the painting exhibits both Whistler’s Courbet-like facture of the 1860s in contrast to other areas that coincide more with his ‘one-skin’ surface of the 1870s and beyond.

In the summer and autumn of 1865 Whistler and Hiffernan were in Trouville, on the Normandy coast, with Courbet. Whistler had used a surface finish analogous to Courbet’s techniques for almost eight years, including his use of a palette knife to apply paint. During that trip, Whistler painted Courbet by the sea in Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville 1865 (YMSM 64; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) and painted at least six additional Courbet-like seascapes. Courbet’s views of the clouds and skies of Trouville reveal vigorous palette knife manipulation of paste-like oil paint. Courbet also painted at least four portraits of Jo in 1865–6, some without Whistler’s knowledge.15 In a letter to Whistler written in 1877, Courbet openly expressed his fondness for one of his own paintings of her.16

A few months after the visit to Trouville, Whistler left for Chile where he stayed from February to October 1866. Before his departure, Whistler designated Hiffernan as his sole heir and gave her power of attorney, allowing her to conduct business in his name, sell his pictures and receive money. She still had trouble subsisting; she sold what she could but wrote to Whistler’s lawyer that she was in want of money.17 Hiffernan may have wondered if Whistler would ever return from South America and later in 1866 crossed the Channel to pose for Courbet again. Commissioned by the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey (1831–1879), Courbet’s Le Sommeil 1866 (Petit Palais, Paris), for which Hiffernan modelled, depicts two women lying nude on a bed, entangled in an embrace. Khalil’s private art collection was exhibited in 1867, so Whistler likely knew about the painting before he had The White Girl back in his possession in the early 1870s.18 Hiffernan and other women with long, loose hair subsequently disappeared from his paintings.

It appears that The White Girl received alterations after Whistler denounced Courbet in 1867. In a letter to Fantin-Latour written that year Whistler said that Courbet’s ‘influence was odious’.19 It is possible that any sense of betrayal Whistler felt over Hiffernan’s interactions with Courbet were taken out on the painting of The White Girl in the form of his attempted removal of the impasto in the face, hand and dress. Whistler also referred to The White Girl as his ‘unlucky picture’ in an April 1872 letter to his friend Alan Summerly Cole (1846–1934), an employee and lace expert at the South Kensington Museum, London (now the Victoria and Albert Museum).20

Whistler’s friendship with Fantin-Latour continued through this period. Their correspondence during the 1860s documents exchanges of ideas for composition and technique, worries about success and frank admissions of failures. In 1864, during a frustrating period of false starts and unfinished paintings, Whistler wrote: ‘at this moment I am so discouraged ... I am so slow! ... I produce very little, because I scrape off so much.’21 In a letter written the following year, Whistler was more positive, writing to his friend that the future belonged to them: ‘The two of us are taking the lead – it’s like at the races – like at the Derby – it’s the thoroughbred that wins.’22

Rossetti and decorated frames

Whistler experimented with pictorial elements associated with the work of his friends, eliminating some and permanently adopting others. When Whistler moved to Chelsea in 1863, he lived near the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) and the two became friends. Around this time, Whistler borrowed visual features from Rossetti’s decorated frames and, in turn, introduced Rossetti to Japanese art.23 In February 1864 Whistler wrote to Fantin-Latour asking him to include Rossetti in Hommage à Delacroix.24 Whistler also introduced Rossetti to Moore, knowing how Moore would have delighted in the poet’s unpredictable humour, but Rossetti considered Moore ‘a dull dog’.25 Rossetti also brought Whistler in contact with the shipowner Frederick Richards Leyland (1831–1892), who became Whistler’s first important patron for portraits and commissioned The Peacock Room 1876–7 (YMSM 178; fig.8) for his house at 49 Princes Gate in Kensington, London.

Rossetti had been making distinctive frames for his drawings and watercolours since the 1850s. These are characterised by a wide, flat frieze ornamented with symmetrically placed decorative roundels and with the wood grain often visible through the gilding (fig.9). Whistler adopted the roundel decorations and visible wood grain during his association with Rossetti, for example in the original frame made for Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl 1864 (YMSM 052; Tate N03418; fig.10). He also created a variation of the gilded roundel frame for his painting Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks 1864 (YMSM 047; Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Moore and the ‘one skin’ surface

Whistler’s friendship with Moore began in 1865 and continued until Moore’s death in 1893. Moore also supported Whistler during the libel trial against the art critic John Ruskin in 1878. Their years of close association in the late 1860s can be traced through their working methods, materials and compositions. Whistler and Moore were credited by Oscar Wilde with setting the tone for the decorative credos of the aesthetic movement in England and raising ‘design and colour to the ideal level of poetry and music’.26 Of their friendship, W. Graham Robertson (1866–1938), a pupil of Moore’s, noted that ‘Whistler was always at his best and gentlest with Albert Moore; he understood the rather slow working of his brain and knew that his thoughts were worth waiting for. Moore on his side adored Whistler, whose quick wit stimulated him.’27 Linda Merrill has documented Whistler’s feelings of devastation and resentment surrounding his 1878 libel suit and his extensive gratitude to Moore for being one of only two artists willing to testify at trial on behalf of Whistler’s art.28

Moore was taught to draw at an early age by members of his large artistic family. The academic methodological drawing and painting techniques he developed after 1865 appear to have been partially derived from the methods of the Pre-Raphaelite artists William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) and John Everett Millais (1829–1896). From 1866, Moore’s paintings almost always portrayed women in Greek robes in shallow spaces filled with densely patterned fabrics, furniture and wallpaper, often in delicate pastel tonalities. Moore’s first Grecian-style oil painting, The Marble Seat 1865 (location unknown) and Whistler’s Little White Girl were both exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1865. Whistler praised Moore’s painting and sought out his acquaintance in August 1865. Whistler then wrote to Fantin-Latour about Moore, suggesting that he replace Legros in the Société des Trois.29

Moore’s painting Pomegranates 1866 (fig.11) is the first known example of the compositional exchange between Moore and Whistler. Whistler appears to have borrowed the painting’s composition and the poses of its female figures for The White Symphony: Three Girls c.1867–9 (YMSM 87; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington; fig.12). Within a few years of their first meeting, both Moore and Whistler had adopted emblematic signatures: Moore signed his paintings with a stylised anthemion beginning in 1866, and Whistler began signing works with a butterfly monogram in 1869. Moore’s anthemion remained the same thereafter, while Whistler’s butterfly took many shapes over the next three decades. Whistler’s first butterfly signature (that is, not added retrospectively) is on a large cartoon for a nude Venus 1869 (M.0357; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington). Pricked and pounced for transfer, probably for one of his many unfinished projects during this period, Venus is Whistler’s most Moore-like nude drawing; the careful anatomy of the figure and clarity of line resemble academic drawing.30

Moore used an unorthodox technique to build up his paintings in multiple layers. He first made detailed charcoal cartoons of models, drawing each figure nude and then with drapery. A rapid colour sketch was then made on a canvas, followed by the application of another white ground, transparent enough to reveal the sketch below. Once the surface had hardened, he transferred an earlier pricked cartoon of the nude onto this surface and painted the nude figure once more but with added detail. Another priming of white lead was then applied, revealing the figure below as a pale, ghostlike form. Moore’s process produced a bright, reflective, textured surface of layered brushwork. The artist’s pupil Alfred Lys Baldry wrote in 1893 that Moore’s chief objective was to do as much as possible in a single application and that he ‘feared to lose the effect of freshness and spontaneity by any suggestion of labour ... Every possible device was used to prevent hesitation or uncertainty in the actual painting.’31 Like Whistler in the 1870s and beyond, Moore used labour-intensive techniques but wished the resulting works to appear spontaneous. As Whistler wrote in his ‘Propositions-No. 2’, ‘All trace of the means used to bring about the end has disappeared’.32

Following a frustrating period of unfinished projects in the 1860s, Whistler completed three distinctive portraits early in the next decade: Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F.R. Leyland 1870–3 (YMSM 093; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington), Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Artist’s Mother 1871 (YMSM 101; Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of Mrs Frances Leyland 1871–4 (YMSM 106; Frick Collection, New York). Of the three, Mrs Leyland’s full-length portrait has the most elaborate Moore-like shallow stage set, comprising a chequerboard rug, dado and Japanese-inspired blossoms, all of which had to be included in the various superimpositions and the final application of the single ‘skin’.

The final surface is truly ‘one skin’, with little evidence of visible brushwork; Mrs Leyland told the Pennells that the painting was laboured over for three years. They reported her saying that ‘at the end of the sitting, the portrait looked as if a few hours’ work the next day was all it needed. But, in the morning, she would find it scraped down.’33 The Pennells explained: ‘If anything went wrong anywhere the whole picture had to come out and be started again.’34 Whistler’s portrait of his new romantic partner and model Maud Franklin (1857–1939; YMSM 132; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; fig.13) illustrates a scraped-down stage of a painting left unfinished.

Walter Sickert (1860–1942), who was a pupil of Whistler’s in the 1880s, described the artist’s painting technique as ‘a series of superimpositions of the same operation based on a hope that the quality of each new operation might be an improvement on the last’.35 Sickert added, more graciously, that Whistler ‘considered it essential to cover the whole picture practically in one wet, and he thereby succeeded in getting the exquisite oneness that gives his work such a rare and beautiful distinction’.36 Franklin had become a supportive and steady presence at this time, so both Whistler’s personal life and his facture stabilised with Arrangement in White and Black 1876–8 (YMSM 185; National Museum of Asian Art, Washington; fig.14), a full-length portrait of Franklin. This portrait on coarse canvas with the weave clearly visible (fig.15) and with ‘exquisite oneness’ continued in his portraits, save one – discussed toward the end of this article – until his death in 1903. Given the labour involved in his process throughout the 1970s it is understandable that Whistler simplified his backgrounds in the 1880s and 1890s.

Godwin, furniture and interior decoration

In the 1870s and 1880s, while continuing his career as an easel painter, Whistler painted furniture, designed interiors and published his views on art theory. From about 1874, he shared a friendship with the architect and designer Edward Godwin that lasted until Godwin’s death in 1886. Whistler visited Godwin every day during the architect’s final, fatal illness. Whistler’s wife Beatrice, whom he married two years later, was Godwin’s widow; she also became Whistler’s pupil. Shared attitudes and techniques can be traced through the surviving works, colour sketches, written opinions and contemporary accounts of both artists.

Whistler and Godwin incorporated asymmetry, simplicity, negative space and clear tints of delicate colour in their decorative art, techniques that were probably concurrently derived from Japanese sources – each became interested in Japanese prints and other art objects in the 1860s – and mutually reinforced by their friendship. During this time, Whistler’s decorative art began to show increased palimpsest, or a breaking through of the underlayers, as part of the final visible surface (fig.16) – a technique that Godwin recommended in his writings and for which precedents can be found in the facture of painted Japanese gold-ground screens. Godwin designed meticulous procedures for applying paint and gilding for harmonious interior colour schemes for his own and clients’ homes. Whistler followed suit in rooms for himself and at least ten homes for friends, clients or relatives.

Whistler and Godwin’s collaboration and friendship are embodied in Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Butterfly Cabinet 1877–8 (YMSM 195; Hunterian, University of Glasgow; fig.17). Godwin designed the cabinet, which was built by the furniture maker William Watt (1834–1885); Whistler decorated the panels at the back of the fireplace, the overmantel and the side panels. These areas show three variations of stylised peacock feathers in a manner that echoes the Peacock Room patterning from 1876–7. After Godwin expressed disappointment in the design of Whistler’s December 1880 exhibition of his Venice etchings at the Fine Art Society, London,37 Whistler spent more time on the arrangement of the drawings and colours for the rooms for the January 1881 exhibition of his Venice pastels, which Godwin subsequently praised in the British Architect.38 Godwin, like Whistler, confronted and corrected art critics in print. In April 1878 Godwin chided the Examiner for errors made in a description of Whistler’s White House, writing ‘Mr. Whistler as owner and Mr. Godwin as author of the work must be prepared to be misunderstood in days devoid alike of simplicity and originality.’ 39

Whistler’s techniques for The Peacock Room aligned with Godwin’s design concepts and were praised at length by Godwin in the Architect in February 1877, where he called the mural of the fighting peacocks (see fig.10) ‘human peacocks’ worthy of Aristophanes.40 Godwin also complimented the room, writing: ‘If there is one quality more admirable than another in the two blues resolving as it were one of them into gold, he has attained what he sought: near iridescent effect without the use of the real colours of the natural plumage.’41 Cross-sectional analysis of samples from the dado reveal that some sections of the room received multiple underlayers of grounding and gilding.42 A study of patterning during a 1989–93 examination and treatment of the Peacock Room revealed variations of blue on green or gold, gold on blue, gold on blue over green-gold ground, blue on gold over green-gold ground, etc. to create the iridescence that Godwin so admired.43

Mallarmé and the ‘trembling’ touch of transfer lithographs

Whistler met Mallarmé in 1888, and that same year the poet translated Whistler’s ‘Ten O’Clock Lecture’, in which the artist defended the concept of ‘art for art’s sake’, that art was not to instruct morals or social behaviour, into French. The two men became close friends, and Whistler attended the poet’s weekly ‘Mardis’ (Tuesdays) salons at his Paris apartment, which had become a kind of unofficial academy for writers, artists and musicians. In 1891 Mallarmé was instrumental in arranging the purchase of Whistler’s portrait of his mother by the French government. Their correspondence continued until the poet’s death in 1898.

In his writings, Mallarmé emphasised the study of ‘tone and colors’, whether in writing, music or painting, and applauded a ‘soft’ and ‘trembling’ touch and sense of the ‘mysterious’ in art.44 The poet praised Whistler for these same qualities, describing him as the ‘enchanter of a work of mystery as inaccessible as perfection itself’ and discussing his ‘softness of touch’.45

In 1876 Fantin-Latour had exhibited transfer lithographs for which he used the frottage technique, placing the paper over a textured surface so that the lines took on what might be described as a ‘trembling’ quality (fig.18). Between 1888 and 1895 Whistler adjusted his previous techniques in lithography. Conforming to Mallarmé’s theories, he began using the transfer lithograph technique to which he had been introduced by Fantin-Latour, creating evanescent lithographs that could be seen as visual embodiments of Mallarmé’s Symbolist poetry. In 1892 Whistler provided a lithograph portrait of Mallarmé as the frontispiece of the poet’s Vers et prose (C.060; fig.19). This portrait, in which Whistler incorporated frottage using a rough buckram book binding, embodies the poet’s concepts of soft touch, trembling line and evanescent form, testifying to their shared concepts.46 Mallarmé wrote to Whistler that the portrait was the only one which truly ‘caught his likeness’.47

Freer and the Little Blue Girl

As well as assembling the most extensive collection of the artist’s work, Charles Lang Freer was an avid follower of Whistler’s art theory and connoisseurship of surfaces. He facilitated the permanent legacy of Whistler’s art through the bequest of his collection to what became the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington. The patron Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970), who saw through the creation of the museum after Freer’s death, noted the friendship reflected in the collection, writing: ‘probably no more complete and delicate tribute has ever been paid one man by another’.48 The association between Freer and Whistler began in 1890, and Freer was taking Whistler for drives almost daily the week of the artist’s death in July 1903.

In 1904 Freer wrote: ‘In painting “The Little Blue and Gold Girl” which engaged more or less of Mr Whistler’s time during the last twelve years of his life, he has summed up in miniature the most mysterious and beautiful qualities of his entire range of painting.’49 The complicated surface of the Little Blue Girl 1894–1903 (YMSM 421; fig.20) shows Whistler’s friendship and love for his artist wife Beatrix and also references his friendship with Freer, who commissioned the painting in 1892 and paid for it in 1894 – the year Beatrix’s cancer became undeniable. Whistler worked on the painting through two years of his wife’s illness; she died in May 1896. Although the painting was to symbolise springtime, it was informed by many personal losses. While the painting was in progress, Whistler lost not only his wife but his younger brother, William, and his friends Moore and Mallarmé. The Little Blue Girl was still in Whistler’s studio when he died on 17 July 1903.

The central figure of the painting is formally analogous to other Whistler nudes with drapery but technically dissimilar to all other paintings of his mature style. Instead of rubbing or scraping down the painting before making additions or corrections as he had done for the previous twenty-five years, Whistler allowed multiple layers to remain. These have since cracked and shrivelled (fig.21). After Beatrix’s death, Whistler wrote to Freer that the Little Blue Girl was ‘a work in which she [Beatrix] had taken her part’ and she had commanded that it ‘be complete’.50 The Little Blue Girl had deep significance for the artist, who told Freer in the same letter: ‘I write to you many letters on your canvas! – and one of these days, you will, by degrees, read them all, as you sit before your picture.’51

Whistler’s grief at Beatrix’s illness and death prevented him from scraping and rubbing down this one painting. The years of his marriage were Whistler’s most prosperous and saw his greatest recognition as an artist; he often referred to Beatrix as his ‘Luck’ and had many warm nicknames for her. His letters to her reveal his aspiration to achieve the ‘one skin’ surface and shed light on his process: he wrote of one painting that he was ‘determined to go through with the whole picture in one perfect final coating – for which I had been enabled to prepare the canvass [sic] with one last scraping’,52 and elsewhere referred to ‘the old scraper’.53 Whistler sought his wife’s approval regularly in their final years together, writing, ‘I am so happy at what you say to me my own dear Luck about my picture’, and ‘I think … that the great Lady may be pleased with what the Grinder has been hammering out on his piano!’54 The one small cross-section I was authorised to take bears witness to the unscraped, multiple built-up layers of oil paint that caused the surface to wrinkle (fig.22).

Whistler was deeply devoted to Beatrix, and that devotion is apparent in the tortured surface of the Little Blue Girl. This painting presents a final example of a surface to study to read Whistler’s emotions and attachments – his turning away from Gustave Courbet or Alphonse Legros in contrast to his devotion to his wife Beatrix and his long-term friendships with Fantin-Latour, Moore, Godwin, Mallarmé and Freer.