Existing comment:
Overtures
"I have several pictures in my head and they only come out with difficulty."
-- Whistler, 1867
While working on The Three Girls, Whistler laid out ideas and arrangements for several other paintings that never progressed beyond these oil studies. One visitor who admired the oil study for The Three Girls in Whistler's studio characterized the other works as "coloured sketches of four of five other subjects of the like class, very promising in point of conception of colour-arrangement." Whistler himself referred to them simply as "sketches of figures & Sea," clearly distinguishing them from his intended masterpiece, which he set in a garden balcony.
In these five oil studies, Whistler breaks entirely from the bold colors of his earlier works, which were painted under the influence of the French realist artist Gustave Courbet. Instead, he adopts a palette of pale tones to create delicately modulated color harmonies. Several of these works combine Japanese accessories, such as fans and parasols, with the glowing drapery and ideal proportions of classical Greek sculpture, an indication of Whistler's pursuit of perfect beauty among different artistic traditions. |