American artist James McNeill Whistler was born on this day in 1834, but spent his adult life in Paris and London.
While in Paris in 1898, lesser-known artist Alice Pike Barney asked Whistler, her teacher, to pose for a portrait.
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A Master—and a Masterful Sketch
American artist James McNeill Whistler was born on this day in 1834, but spent his adult life in Paris and London.
While in Paris in 1898, lesser-known artist Alice Pike Barney asked Whistler, her teacher, to pose for a portrait.
Alice quickly sketched his head in pastel, adding only suggestion of collar and tie. At the end of forty minutes, Whistler rose and joined Alice at her easel. Alice held her breath. Had she been too audacious? Whistler surveyed the drawing from all angles. The silence lengthened. Finally, near tears and fearing the worst from this master of the cutting remark, Alice managed to blurt out, "It isn't finished!" She took a deep breath. "When can you come to pose again?" Whistler continued to examine the drawing. "It is very amusingly done, dear lady. I'll come again but you must not paint at it again, you might spoil it."
Following Whistler's departure that evening, Alice returned to study her portrait of him. She looked at it carefully and critically. She had not romanticized him, but she had caught something in her sketch that others seemed unable to see: "the kindliness of his manner" that accompanied "the frank genuineness of his criticism."
Source: Jean L. Kling. Alice Pike Barney: Her Life and Art (Washington, D.C. and London: National Museum of American Art in cooperation with Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).
Pictured: Alice Pike Barney, 1857–1931, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1898, pastel on paperboard, 19 1/4 x 19 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Laura Dreyfus Barney and Natalie Clifford Barney in memory of their mother, Alice Pike Barney.