Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Figure 4. James Whistler, Harmony in
Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander,
1872-1874. Oil on canvas. The Tate Gal­
lery, London.

188

Although this is a description of Whistler's late work, the artist acknowledges

that he learned his approach from Gleyre and therefore would have employed

similar methods throughout his career, with either a wider range of pigments

or less mixing of pigments in his earlier work. Menpes confirms the attention

to the palette but attributes to him the use of more intense lemon and cad­

mium yellows placed next to the ochre, and the use of rose madder instead

of the Venetian red (7).

Whistler kept a great number of brushes, many of which he used at a single

sitting in order to prevent his dominant hues from becoming fu rther mixed.

He spent much time cleaning and preparing these brushes, sometimes trim­

ming and changing their shape. He had various types, including decorator's

brushes to lay in grounds and backgrounds and extremely long-handled

brushes fo r his portrait technique.

Pigments analyzed

Analysis of pigments fo und on Whistler's paintings confirm the use of com­

plex mixtures of pigments usually involving at least some ivory black.

Frequently, the same pigments are fo und mixed in different proportions

throughout a painting. In nocturnes, mixtures of lead white, ivory black, co­

balt, Prussian blue, and ultramarine have been fo und. By these means, Whistler

produced his harmonies. For instance, Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely

Alexander (1872) has a gray background, but this is an optical mixture of

several colors based on lead white and ivory black (Fig. 4). The same colors

occur in the superficially white dress. By restricting the saturation and hue

of his colors throughout the scheme, Whistler could model his fo rms without

introducing discordant hues typical of the works of many nineteenth-century

painters influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and exploiting a range of unmixed

pigments. This restriction allowed him to explore subtle color effects; fo r

example, he could choose to highlight a red as in the Arrangement in Flesh

Color and Black: Portrait <1 Theodore Duret (1883-1884), intensified by the

blacks and reflected in the grays of the rest of the composition (Plate 37).

Whistler also subdued his colors by painting over a dark ground; in addition,

he was able to use the coolness of his ground to give his thin scumbles a

cooler tone than thicker applications of identical paint. This is most easily

seen in the depiction of the rush matting on which Cicely Alexander stands.

Application

The actual application of paint fo llowed several stages of development

throughout his career. His early oil paintings, influenced by Courbet and the

realist school, were quite thickly painted, very directly brushed with impasto.

They have a tactile quality as in the rocks of the Coast <1 Brittany (1861).

Although quite different in subject matter, Symphony in White No. 1 (1862),

now in the National Gallery of Art, is in a similar technique. It is on a coarse

canvas with a commercial white ground, onto which Whistler has applied his

own gray imprimatura. The head and hand are out of key with the rest of

the work because they have been repainted fo llowing lining of the canvas. In

Symphony in White No. 3 (1865-1867), Whistler applied his paint quite thinly

with fine but stiff hog's-hair brushes, leaving distinct and delicate lines on the

surface. The success of this thin, sketchy application must have encouraged

him to explore such methods fu rther. In his portraits he claimed to paint alla

prima, thereby retaining the tactile quality of his brush marks and his wet-in­

wet application. To do this he needed to work quickly and confidently; how­

ever, he came far from achieving this ideal. Therefore, he would sometimes

be obliged to scrape off his entire work at the end of a day and restart at the

next sitting. He would also clean off his palette and make up a new one the

fo llowing day. Possibly from his experience of earlier overworked paintings,

he fe ared excessive alteration; therefore, if he was dissatisfied, rather than add

too much overpaint he would rub or scrape off as much as possible of the

image, often damaging the ground and exposing the canvas-weave tops (Fig.

Historical Painting Tech niques, Materials, and Studio Practice