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Whistler, Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl
Meg Floryan
Radical Portraiture
James Abbott McNeil
Whistler,
Symphony in White, No. 1:
The White Girl, 1862, oil on canvas
(National Gallery of Art, Washington
D.C.)
The woman in white stands facing us,
her
long hair loose, framing her face.
Her expression is blank, her
surroundings indistinct; posed before
some sort of pallid curtain, she appears
almost as an immobile prop on a stage.
Symphony in White, No. 1: The White
Girlepitomizes James Abbott McNeill
Whistler’s departure from the
established norms of the era, and was
perhaps his most reviled work. When he
submitted it to the 1863 Paris Salon, the
jury rejected the painting and the artist
instead showed The White Girl at
Napoleon III’s exhibition of snubbed
artwork, the Salon des Refusés. Though
it certainly defied many time-honored
artistic conventions and earned much
derision from critics, The White
Girl does show some echoes of older
standards. After all, its creator had
studied under Marc-Charles Gabriel
Gleyre in Paris, learning to paint in the
academic manner – thus it is
unsurprising that in the representation
of his mistress Joanna Hiffernan,
Whistler opts for the customary full-
scale society portrait format, and
reproduces her features in a seemingly
realistic and honest fashion.
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The ways in which Whistler follows his own rules, however, far outnumber the few examples of
accord, and they include the painting’s flattened and abstracted forms,
distorted perspective,
limited color palette, and penchant for decorative patterning. Though an intimate portrait, The
White Girl is contrived and reveals no overarching mood or the personality of its sitter. While
many of Whistler’s stylistic innovations are unique to the artist, he associated himself with other
artists – such as Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, who also defied the traditions of
academicism. The influence of Théophile Gautier is also apparent; in the 1830s, Gautier stated
that art need not contain any moral message or describe any narrative, as art making is an end in
and of itself – Whistler accepted this credo, “art for art’s sake,” wholeheartedly. In this light, The
White Girl is less a faithful portrait painting and more an experimentation in color, pattern, and
texture.
Whistler produced many portraits of similar format in the next decades, and continued to fine-
tune his style and technique. In paintings such as
Harmony in Gray and Green: Cecily
Alexander(1872-74) and
Arrangement in Flesh Color and Black: Portrait of Théodore
Duret (1883), the artist exercised his need to balance the realist components of a picture with its
more abstract needs, cherry-picking elements from the real world and reorganizing them in
controlled, harmonious ways. Often these images feature a subdued palette, a lack of depth,
unresolved backdrops, and irrational props that serve only as accents. His figures typically stand
upon an unthinkably flat floor, appearing almost to hover like specters. As for Whistler’s
signature, it evolved to take the form of a butterfly, applied to the surface in the manner of a
mere decorative element.
Despite the controversy stirred when he entered the scene, Whistler won many wealthy and
prestigious patrons over his career, and his portraits stand as testaments to growing interest in the
radical new avant-garde approach to painting.