Portrait of Lady Meux
Portrait of Lady Meux is a name given to several full-length portraits by
James McNeill Whistler was an American expatriate and one of the most accomplished portraitists of his time.[4] However, the artist had become bankrupt in 1879, following his lawsuit against the critic John Ruskin.
In 1881,
Whistler painted a second portrait of Lady Meux in 1881 called Harmony in Pink and Grey (Portrait of Lady Meux) which belongs to the Frick Collection in New York City. This full-length portrait shows the subject on stage standing before a pinkish-grey curtain, in an obvious allusion to her alleged stage career. She wears a light grey dress trimmed in pink satin. The butterfly emblem that Whistler used as a signature is on the right side of the painting a little below the middle. Whistler assigned many of his paintings titles with terms like “arrangement” and “harmony”, which may be interpreted as either musical or abstract.
A third painting known as Portrait of Lady Meux in Furs was also commenced in 1881. This canvas was probably destroyed by the artist in a dispute with the sitter,[7] however a photograph of it exists in the Whistler Archives, University of Glasgow, Scotland. Both the Honolulu painting and the destroyed painting belong to a series of “black portraits”, paintings Whistler executed at various stages of his career in a palette dominated by black.
Additional images
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Portrait of Lady Meux in Furs, photograph of lost oil painting
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Arrangement in Black, No. 5 (Portrait of Lady Meux), drawing in brown ink by James McNeill Whistler, c. 1881
References
- Bradburn, Elizabeth, Margaret McMillan: Portrait of a Pioneer, London, Routledge, 1989, p. 29.
- Ellis, George R., Honolulu Academy of Arts, Selected Works, Honolulu, Honolulu Academy of Arts, 1990, 222.
- Ellis, George R. and Marcia Morse, A Hawaii Treasury, Masterpieces from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Tokyo, Asahi Shimbun, 2000, 98 & 208-9.
- Frick Collection, The Frick Collection, An Illustrated Catalogue, Vol. 1, Paintings: American, British, Dutch, Flemish, and German, New York, Frick Collection, pp. 18–20, ISBN 0-691-03811-2.
- Glancey, Jonathan, Temple of Doom, The Guardian, Wednesday 17 November 2004.
- Sutton, Denys, Whistler and Lady Meux, Honolulu Academy of Arts Journal, Vol. 1, 1974, 36-43.