Existing comment:
Coda
This is a modern copy of the frame that Whistler intended for The Three Girls. It was the most elaborate frame he ever designed, and this reproduction indicates the scale and horizontal orientation of that never-completed painting. The floral decorations would have harmonized with both the painting's garden theme and the flowers that originally adorned the antique leather wall hangings in Leyland's dining room. A musical passage from Six Moments musicaux by the Austrian composer Franz Schubert is inscribed in a prominent position at the bottom center of the frame. It undoubtedly alludes to Whistler's theory of aesthetic correspondences between painting and music, and it would have pleased Leyland, a music enthusiast.
Curiously, this exquisite frame has survived while the painting has not. After quarreling with Leyland over the expense of decorating the Peacock Room and then destroying The Three Girls, Whistler turned the frame on its side and reused it in 1879 for his vindictive caricature of Leyland. That painting -- The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre -- in Whistler's original frame hangs on the opposite wall. |