Original subtitles

Whistler is one of the pioneers of modern art and the personification of its contradictory

spirit and energy. He was confident bordering on arrogant, elegant bordering on vain, intelligent,

articulate, controversial and original. He was the first great international American

artist, hugely well-traveled, a painter and printmaker who reinvigorated the decorative

arts in England, who bridged the gap between Impressionist Paris and Symbolist London and

who radically proclaimed that art, rather than telling stories or documenting aspects

of the world around us, should be experienced for its own sake, rather in the way that music

is. James Abbott MacNeil Whistler was born on the 11th of July, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts.

His father was a West Point graduate who became a railway engineer. For the first six years

of his life, Whistler and his family traipsed up and down the railroads as his father's

work took him from Massachusetts to Connecticut and then back to Massachusetts again. And

then, in 1842, when Whistler was just eight, his father got an extraordinary commission to

go and help establish the first railroad in Russia, between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

In St. Petersburg, an art teacher singled Whistler out for, quote, his uncommon genius. But a cholera

outbreak forced the family to move to England. Here, he was taken under the wing of the painter

William Boxall, who, in palaces like Hampton Court, showed him the work of the great past

masters. And Whistler decided it was in their footsteps he wished to tread. But just as he was

beginning to settle in London, Whistler's father died, and once again, the family had to up sticks

and returned to the USA in 1849. Two years later, Whistler, like his father, entered the U.S. military

academy at West Point. He was a popular student but undisciplined, which eventually saw him expelled

by the academy superintendent, one Robert E. Lee. The one course in which he had excelled, though,

was drawing and etching. And in order to develop these skills, Whistler decided to leave the United

States in 1855, never to return, and to head to the art capital of the Western world, Paris.

Whistler seems to have made the most of his time in Paris. For a start, he enters the studio of a

painter called Charles Glare, where he learns even more of the painter's trade. He then spends time

in the Louvre copying old masters, and perhaps most importantly of all, he starts to hang out with

contemporary artists in the city. There was a kind of bohemian scene, the artist as a fashionable

outsider, slightly impoverished, hanging out in cafes exchanging ideas. And there's no doubt

that Whistler started to do that. But there was another scene, that of the dandy, that Whistler

embraced much more wholeheartedly. He'd seen himself as a dandy from his time at West Point.

But in Paris, the critic and poet Charles Baudelaire had talked about the dandy as being part of a cult

of the self, artists in some ways striking a pose and also finding themselves an original kind of

personality. And I think all of that feeds into this early self-portrait by Whistler.

The painter peering out of the darkness into the light and trying to strike his own pose,

develop his own personality, and by extension, his own artistic vision. And straight after this work,

he embarks on the first major oil painting of his career.

At the piano is a family portrait. It shows Whistler's sister, Deborah, together with her daughter,

to Annie, playing music, but in a way that seems rather hollow and joyless.

The piano had originally been in St. Petersburg with the family, and Deborah would play duets

with her father on the flute. After his death, the piano was shipped to Deborah's house in London,

where she lived with her husband.

Whistler shows his sister dressed in black, with her daughter in contrasting white,

the colours of mourning for Victorian adults and children, respectively.

The addition of brown amplifies the sombre mood of the work, a painting which suggests memory and

mourning, a lament for a lost father, where all extraneous detail is stripped back, and Whistler

concentrates on a simple but effective format of horizontal lines, almost like the staves on a

sheet of music, a reference which will grow stronger and more pronounced over the coming years.

Whistler finished at the piano in the early spring of 1859, and submitted it to the Paris Salon,

the place for artists to gain recognition and to sell their work, but where the establishment

ruled the roost, and were likely to look with suspicion at anything which seemed experimental

or unacademic, and Whistler's painting was duly rejected.

Later in 1859, and probably partly because of his rejection at the Salon in Paris,

Whistler moved here to London, and ended up taking an apartment here in Wapping,

then part of the busiest docks in Europe.

And in fact, it brought Whistler closest to the part of London that was to inspire much

of his best art for the rest of his career, the River Thames, starting out here in the

east, and eventually moving west to Chelsea.

London itself was experiencing difficulties.

In fact, within a year of Whistler being there, the Thames froze solid for 14 weeks, and it was

that that inspired this picture, Thames on Ice, by Whistler in the winter of 1860.

The scene is elevated.

Whistler looks down on the river, and you see various men trying to go about their daily

work, trying to break through the ice and unload this coal ship.

Formally, the way the painting's arranged is interesting.

It's broken in half, with the ship and its tall mast on this side, which give it a nice

vertical thrust, which is echoed here by the man in the foreground that leads us, the spectator,

into the picture, but also he layers it horizontally in bands of kind of murky mud, of snow or ice.

Then on the horizon, the factories of London.

And the painting is painted in a fairly radical way.

He applies it onto his brush, loaded and unmixed, and drags the paint across the surface of the

canvas to reveal something of the weave underneath, and you get this amazing texture that is both

mud and ice of the solid river.

Whistler's absorption of the English art scene, but also his credentials as an Anglo-French painter,

are brilliantly exemplified in this work.

It's called Symphony in White No. 1, The White Girl, but that's not what Whistler called it

when he first showed it.

It was just called The White Girl.

And it shows his mistress and his model, and muse, I suppose, at this stage in his career,

Joanne Hiffenon, in a studio in Paris.

He's gone back to Paris in the summer of 1861, and he puts a white sheet over the window,

stands her in front of it, and paints her in a white dress, a modest white dress,

maybe not by our standards, but remember, this is the age of crinolines.

And she's holding a white lily, and she's standing on a bare skin.

Now, what does it mean?

Some people thought this was a painting that wrestled with the idea of a loss of virtue,

or perhaps a loss of virginity.

Not so, says Whistler.

Whistler maintains that he simply wants to try and produce a rather daring image of a

woman in white against a different tone of white.

And he's trying to produce a neutral image, and he's being deliberately provocative and

mysterious.

And it's about the process of painting and of representation.

And simply, this is a woman in an artist's studio being painted.

Now, for those reasons, and for one other reason, the work was rejected, or when it

was presented to be shown by Whistler, at the Royal Academy in London.

The other reason being that to contemporise, the loose treatment of paint here meant that

they considered the work to be unfinished.

Now, Whistler, in a way, loves this, because he then shows it in London a few months later,

in a commercial gallery in Berner Street, with a label next to it saying, rejected by the

Academy.

A year later, he takes it to Paris, to the illustrious Salon there.

It gets rejected again.

And in fact, it's then shown in what's called the Salon de Refusé, where all the artworks

that had been rejected by the Salon were gathered together, including perhaps the most celebrated

controversial work of the 19th century, Manet's Déjeuner-sur-Lerbe.

And oddly enough, this work causes almost a similar kind of stir as the Manet.

And Whistler becomes associated with what's called the avant-garde, or vanguard advanced

artists.

And Whistler suddenly has pushed himself to the forefront of the art scene in Paris and in

London.

Apart from the influence of photography, which was slow to develop through the middle of the

19th century, the single most important impact on Western art was Japanese painting.

And this came about because in 1854, Japan and America signed a treaty, and it meant that

Japan started to export, in particular, art and artefacts.

And so that struck a chord and became a fashion amongst artists and men and women of society

throughout Western Europe.

And that's reflected and perhaps inspires this painting by Whistler, called The Balcony,

painted in the late 1860s, when Whistler was wrestling with his own style.

And in a way, this is a transitional painting.

In the foreground, you can see four women having a Japanese party, or tea party, on a balcony.

And stylistically, the Japanese interest in flattening form, also cropping, this is an

asymmetrical painting, which is cropped, seems to be savagely cropped on the right-hand side.

And then you get these azalea flowers, seeming to float across the surface of the canvas, and

butterflies, up here in the top left-hand corner.

And here, in the bottom left-hand corner, Whistler, instead of signing his paintings,

starting to use the butterfly as his own emblem, his own mark.

But this is a painting of contrasts, and it's a hybrid painting.

Because, in fact, look at the faces of the women.

They're not Japanese.

They're Western women, dressing up, theatrically playing the part, if you like.

And then in the background, you see factories and a river, that in fact is the River Thames.

And this is Whistler's own balcony in Chelsea, in the west end of London.

And he fuses these two realities together.

And there's a contrast of the almost monochrome of the river and the factories, with the bright

colour of the Japanese tea party in the foreground.

And this contrast between the prosaic and the exotic, and between painting as an illusion,

and painting as a decorative arrangement for mainly aesthetic reasons of colour and form,

becomes the main tension in Whistler's art for the rest of his career.

A 37-year-old Whistler shared his Chelsea home, now number 96, Cheney Walk, with his mother,

who wrote to friends of how her son enjoyed his early morning rose on the river before joining

her for breakfast.

Then he'd go to his studio and lock himself away to work.

But the boundaries became blurred for a time at the end of the summer of 1871, when he

decided to get his mother to sit for him.

Actually, she stood first of all, but after three days, Whistler realised it was too tiring

for a 67-year-old woman.

And so she sat, gazing off into space, at right angles to her son, and presenting a noble,

resigned profile for his contemplation.

The work has become one of the most famous portraits ever made, odd in a way for such a

mute picture dominated by black and grey.

But that's part of its appeal.

Its solemnity, which opens it up to parody and humour.

It's also a touchingly intimate portrayal of a man's mother, with whom he had a difficult

relationship, but whom he clearly loved and respected.

Anna Matilda McNeil Whistler was a devout Episcopalian Protestant, who went to church each and every

Sunday.

Her resigned, but defiant expression reflects a life of material comfort, but maternal grief.

She'd lost two children and a husband, and Whistler manages to convey the patience, fortitude

and quiet dignity of a woman who has never quite got over her loss, and never will.

Whistler painted her portrait on the back of an old canvas, a gesture of economy that his

mother may well have approved of, and which gave the painting a smooth, saturated, matte

surface, which made her head all the more subtly pronounced, as if it were almost alive and

about to turn towards us.

Although the initial sittings with his mother were finished after a couple of months, the

painting took Whistler years to complete, a labour of filial love, which has struck a

universal chord.

Soon after completing the portrait of his mother, Whistler began the most original and the most

radical series of his entire life, called The Nocturnes, of which this, subtitled Blue

and Gold, Old Battersea Bridge, is the most celebrated, and perhaps the most extreme.

When you look at it, it is clear that you're looking at a cropped version of Battersea Bridge,

but rather than being a literal description, what Whistler is doing is giving us something

that is evocative, that is atmospheric, hence the title Nocturne.

Obviously, this is painted at night, but the Nocturnes actually stem from Chopin's music,

and he's trying to create a musical analogy.

What Whistler is doing is moving towards the idea of abstraction, and moving art away from

literal depiction, because photography is already starting to do that.

And he's putting forward an idea that's new in British art, that's developed in France,

called Art for Art's Sake.

And Whistler says that art should be liberated from all claptrap, and that it should only appeal

to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without, as he puts it, introducing emotions that are

foreign to it.

The scale and ambition of Whistler's work increased dramatically, with a project that he began

in 1876, known as the Peacock Room, which is one of the great achievements of decorative

arts in the 19th century.

It was for this room, the dining room, of a shipping magnate called Frederick Leyland,

who had a house in London, and Leyland had an interior architect, a man called Jekyll,

who was designing a room to show off his amazing porcelain collection.

And Whistler was only invited in to advise about the colours to paint the doors and the

shutters.

There was a painting by Whistler that Leyland had bought here, which was at the centre of

this wall, called The Princess in the Land of Porcelain.

And Whistler argued that this painting actually looked much better in a room that wasn't decorated

by red leather panelling, which is how the room was originally designed.

So he had an agreement with Leyland that he'd just put some yellow on the walls in order

to bring the thing to life.

Leyland went away, having agreed this, and then Whistler took over.

And this is the result.

Imagine, you've agreed one thing, when you come back, this is how the room looks.

And Whistler takes over, paints all the leather walls blue.

He then adds gold to paint these extraordinary peacocks full of plumage on all the shutters

and the walls, and eventually creates a total art environment.

He titles this as a work, Harmony in Blue and Gold, The Peacock Room.

Now, when Leyland returns, actually, he's not over the moon, because Whistler gives him

a bill for 2,000 guineas, and they have an argument, and in the end, they settle at 1,000 pounds.

And Whistler gets his revenge by painting on the final wall this mural of two fighting peacocks,

one covered in money and with money on the ground, and the other with a little plume,

which is reminiscent of Whistler's own whitening curls, and he calls this Art and Money, the Story of the Room.

And the upshot is positive.

Leyland keeps it as a dynamo and uses it, and later, it's acquired by an American railroad magnate

called Charles Freer, and it ends up here in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington.

And for Whistler, it's one of his crowning achievements, a giant lacquered box

that he, when he goes to Venice and sees the mosaics at St. Mark's, thinks just shades them.

Customary Whistler arrogance.

And that dispute and the achievement of the peacock room put Whistler onto a different level of reputation,

but also of notoriety.

But just round the corner is a dispute of even greater magnitude.

In fact, it's the most famous trial in art history.

The furore began with an explosive painting, this ambitious attempt by Whistler to show a firework

bursting into life against a night sky, and part of the ongoing Nocturne series.

The work's called Nocturne, Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket.

The painting was reviewed by the most eminent art critic of the day, John Ruskin,

himself a painter, but a better writer, historian and polemicist,

who described Whistler's work, on sale for 200 guineas, as a pot of paint flung in the public's face.

Whistler was outraged and sued for libel, and the case was heard over two days,

in a courtroom packed with press and public.

Aside from the drama and notoriety of the event, various issues were at stake,

not least Whistler's belief that art could and should exist for its own sake.

His description of the Nocturne, not as a view of the river or as part of London,

but, quote,

an arrangement of line and form and colour,

anticipated the whole development of abstract painting in the 20th century.

But the crux of the case was Ruskin's obsession with the finished quality of works of art,

and the idea of cost equaling labour.

Under questioning from the Attorney General, no less,

Whistler was asked,

did you take much time to paint the Nocturne in black and gold?

How soon did you knock it off?

To which he replied sardonically,

oh, I knock one off possibly in a couple of days,

one day to do the work, another to finish it.

The labour of two days is that for which you asked 200 guineas,

asked the Attorney General.

No, replied Whistler,

I ask it for the knowledge I've gained in the work of a lifetime,

for which he was roundly applauded.

In the end, Whistler won the case,

but was humiliated by damages of a farthing.

Whistler felt vindicated,

but he was bankrupt, thanks in part to the trial.

So he decided to leave London and head to Venice.

Just as he'd done with his pictures of the River Thames,

so Whistler was picking up the mantle of JMW Turner in going to Venice.

But he ventured much further afield,

going off the Grand Canal

and into the watery labyrinth of back streets and canals.

I've learnt to know, Whistler wrote,

a Venice in Venice that others have never perceived.

True or not, on his return to London in 1881,

the Venetian paintings were a considerable commercial success.

Whistler's travels became an important footnote

in the history of English painting,

when in December 1883,

he came here, to the Cornish fishing town of St Ives.

In a way, he was following in Turner's footsteps

and became the second in an illustrious line of English artists

who settled in the place

and made it one of the most significant artist colonies in Europe,

culminating 100 years later in the building of the Tate St Ives.

At the age of 51,

Whistler showed no signs of slowing down.

A colleague, Menpez, recalled,

Whistler rose at Cockrow

and seemed always full of the most untiring energy,

screaming reproaches, instructions,

taunts and commands

at the somnolent followers.

But there were also signs that the painter was mellowing,

at least emotionally,

when he became involved with the wife of an architect

who'd just died.

Beatrice Godwin,

who sat for this painting in 1886,

was herself a painter

and the experience seemed to bring the two together.

Two years later,

Whistler and Beatrice married.

In 1894,

Charles Freer,

the American railroad magnate

who eventually acquired the Peacock Room,

asked Whistler

to paint him a spring picture.

And Whistler's response,

ironically,

in homage to the Peacock Room,

because the first part of the title

was Harmony in Blue and Gold,

was this work,

of a nude young girl,

a little blue girl,

as it's subtitled.

And if you look at this work now,

it doesn't really have that spring-like field,

although a young adolescent girl

on the verge of womanhood

was an age-old symbol for the idea of spring.

But something happens

in between Whistler starting this work

and his eventual completion of it.

When he began the picture,

Whistler was in one of the happier periods of his life.

His marriage to Beatrice was strong.

But within a year or so,

she was diagnosed as having cancer.

And Whistler paints and draws

and makes lithographs

of a series of very moving images,

the best of which is called By the Balcony,

and shows his wife lying in bed

at the room in the Savoy where they were staying,

with an image of London

that Whistler had painted

so frequently throughout his life,

seeming to flicker off

and almost disappear into the distance.

And on the 10th of May, 1896,

Beatrice dies,

and Whistler is consumed,

overwhelmed by grief,

and eventually writes a letter to Freer,

apologising for not being in touch with him,

explaining what has happened,

and saying that he feels unable

to convey his grief

through anything other than his canvases.

And it's in that context, I think,

that we should look at this work,

because the figure of the girl

seems to be almost on the verge

of being overwhelmed

by this bluey-grey cape.

And in a way,

it's an eloquent image

of the idea of grief.

That's one way in which you can see it.

And it's only after Whistler's death

that Freer finally acquires the work

that he requested

as an image of springtime,

but I think whose vision now

is much more autumnal.

Whistler's last years

were slightly listless,

and it's certainly fair to say

he never recovered

from Beatrice's death.

He sold his Parisian house

and studio

and continued to travel

as he'd always done,

venturing as far afield

as Rome,

Gibraltar,

and North Africa.

There were numerous honours

bestowed on him,

and various celebratory exhibitions too,

but he painted little of consequence,

and finally,

on the 17th of July, 1903,

Whistler died in London,

a few days after his 69th birthday.

In his will,

Whistler stipulated

that none of the work

that he owned

should ever find a place

in an English art gallery,

and yet in spite

of his eventual contempt

for the English,

mainly as a result of the trial,

he was perhaps

the man most responsible

for the development

of modern art in England,

particularly abstract painting.

There are those

who take Whistler's art

and personality

a little too much

at face value,

stressing his obsession

with good taste

and aesthetic appearance,

and there's no doubt

that the fame and notoriety

he achieved in his lifetime

continues to obscure the fact

that along with his delicate

and refined technique,

Whistler was an experimental artist

with a constantly questioning vision

as to what painting was

and what it might become.

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