Mr. Whistler's gallery: the art of displaying art

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Kenneth John Myers

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The only large painting in the exhibition was a life-sized portrait of a young girl entitled Scherzo in Blue: The Blue Girl (Fig. 2). The concept underlying the inclusion of the one large work was most clearly explained by Whistler's friend, the architect Edward William Godwin (1833-1886), who began his review of the show by noting that "the collection consists of sixty-six small paintings, drawings, pastels--stars of different magnitudes, grouped around a blue moon--a life-size full-length portrait called by the artist 'Scherzo in blue--The Blue Girl." (17) That Godwin's metaphor expressed the artist-designer's own conception of the installation seems to be confirmed by a letter Whistler wrote the Dowdeswells shortly before the exhibition opened, requesting they send their van to his studio to pick up "the Blue Girl among the little ones. (18) The exhibition also included at least one and probably two medium-sized paintings: Green and Opal: The Village (Freer Gallery) and Nocturne in Black and Gold: Rag Shop, Chelsea (Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts). (19) The comparatively low and high catalogue numbers assigned to these paintings (numbers 7 and 58, respectively) suggests that they were placed on the left and right walls, near the entrance to the room, roughly opposite each other: In his memoirs, the artist Mortimer Menpes (1855-1938) recalled that the Scherzo in Blue had "occupied a central position on one of the walls. (20) The catalogue number given to Scherzo in Blue, number 31 of 67, suggests that it was placed approximately midway in the room, so it was probably given pride of place as the focal point of the wall facing the entrance to the gallery. Whistler used the one large painting and the two mediumsized ones as focal points, juxtaposing them with the sixty-four works that surrounded them, treating all sixty-seven objects both as independent works of art and as the "notes" of the exhibition's title, making up the grand symphony of his installation. The visual relationship between the larger works and the small ones implied Whistler's belief that the importance of a work of art depends solely on the success with which it organizes color and line into a harmonious and therefore beautiful whole. It has nothing to do with mere size. The moon appears to be larger than the surrounding- stars, but that does not make it more beautiful. (21)

Except for Rag Shop, which was painted about 1878, and a pastel entitled Blue and Silver--The Islands, Venice (1880; Freer Gallery), it seems that every work in the show was completed after Whistler's return from Venice. Indeed, most of the works in the exhibition, probably more than fifty, were completed after his show of Venetian etchings closed at the end of March 1883. Whistler had little choice but to include so many new works in the 1884 exhibition. He had been very productive during his long stay in Venice (September 1879-November 1880), but by the summer of 1883 he had exhibited most of that work, including every one of the major Venice etchings, pastels, and oils (except the two medium-sized nocturnes in oil). Moreover, he had spent much of 1881 and 1882 printing the Venice etchings and working on a few large portraits, so that, while he had a few recent large paintings to send to the Grosvenor Gallery in London and other group shows, he did not have enough work for another one-man exhibition.