Sweet Silent Thought: Whistler’s Interiors

In Victorian England in the nineteenth century, life was separated into gendered spheres. The masculine realm was often characterized by outward-directed activities of physical exertion, industry, and business. Women, on the other hand, were identified with the private world of imagination and self-reflection, as seen in this selection of prints by American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler. Images of private, enclosed spaces, inhabited by quiet, self-contained figures, recur from his earliest etchings in the mid-1850s to his later watercolors and lithographs. Family members, close friends, or the artist’s current mistress almost always serve as the focus of these interior scenes. This sense of intimacy is underscored by the works’ small scale, which compels the viewer to stand close and study the scene carefully. Whistler’s interiors thus encourage us to retreat—like his subjects—into a realm of “sweet silent thought.”

Whistler’s Interiors

At the age of twenty-one Whistler made a self-conscious and deliberate decision to become a professional artist. When he left the United States for France in 1855, he associated himself with Gustav Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, and other avant-garde painters and poets in Paris. He also maintained a close relationship with his half-sister Deborah Haden and her family in London. In 1858, at the urging of Deborah’s husband, the surgeon and amateur etcher Francis Seymour Haden, Whistler began a series of etchings in which figures read, play music, or daydream in a domestic interior.

In the nearly half-century that followed, Whistler’s artistic style underwent a significant change. He detached himself from the realism of Courbet, embraced the “art for art’s sake” ideals of British aestheticism, and developed an increasingly abstract approach to representation. He also continued to explore and refine favorite motifs. Images of reading and making music allowed Whistler to depict figures whose concentrated attention seems to block out the surrounding world.

Whistler was also fascinated by the sense of reverie conveyed by pensive women in languid poses. A drawing of young Weary of the artist’s mistress Jo Hiffernan exemplify this interest. The late lithograph Nude Model, Reclining, the woman seems unaware of being observed, while the artist’s presence is implied by a sketchy, evocative touch. Some of Whistler’s earliest studio images, however, are constructed as self-portraits that give the viewer a “behind-the-scenes” glimpse of the generally private spaces in which concentrated attention, associated with both reverie and artistic creativity, is exercised.

All of these works are by the American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) and are the Gift of Charles Lang Freer.

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