Whistler and the Freer

In addition to the Asian art collection, the Freer has an American art collection, devoted largely to the paintings of Whistler and Dewing. Of the two, the Whistlers seem the weaker to me..... but what do I know? I get the same feeling of "not quite finished" that I got when I saw the Berthe Morrisot exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, reported earlier on this very same blog.

I am referring to the later Whistler pictures with the quasi-Japanese motifs. I like the motifs, and I like the paintings, but why (for example) didn't he put faces on the faces? Know what I mean?

Then, there is the Peacock Room, the dark green and gold room that was moved here from England by Mr. Freer. I really like the Peacock Room. I would like one of my own.

Whistler clearly could paint with more polish than his later, orientalish paintings. Think of his mother, hanging by herself (i.e., away from the family) in the Louvre. There is one portrait here of equal quality, although larger (more than life size), a full portrait, head to toe (or more precisely head to shoes) of Mr. Leyland, the English industrialist who not only bankrolled Mr. Whistler for a good part of his career, but also was the original owner of the Peacock Room, in merry olde Liverpool. This painting is correctly identified by the museum as in the style of the earlier Spanish portraitists, and most specifically Zuburan.

At any event, we know about Whistler's mother, but how many of know about Whistler's father, or about the fact that once I said to myself (and to my wife): I want to write a book called "Whistler's Father", a biography. But, as Ecclesiastes said (and as was repeated in the old Oxydol commercials), there is nothing new under the sun, and I discovered the book has been written.

But you should know about him. Whistler's father started adult life as a surveyor, helping to map out the Northwest Territories (now known as Ohio), and then went to work for a Boston railroad, designing the first railway bridges that connected New England, through the Berkshire, to the west. The bridges are still around, but no longer in use, and generally available for view only by intrepid Western Mass. hikers.

But he was so good at this that he was hired by the Tsar of Russia (actually by the Tsar of All the Russias), Alexander the (probably) II, although perhaps the III, to design and supervise the construction of the first railway linking St. Petersburg (later Petrograd, later Leningrad, later St. Petersburg) to Moscow (always Moscow or, more appropriately, Moskva). The entire family moved to Russia, which is where Whistler spent his formative years (before going to Florence to study), and where his father, still a young man, died on the job.

I do not think Whistler ever lived in the USA again. I think he spent most of his active life in England.

So, America, Russia, Italy, England, and then he hung his mother in France.

Read the book. It is called, as you already know, "Whistler's Father" and was written eons ago.