We haven’t been to Tate Britain since 2019 when a Van Gogh exhibition was showing. We returned this trip to see Whistler. Tate Britain says there hasn’t been a Whistler exhibition in Europe for 30 years.
We tubed to Westminster station. Weather was getting positively hot even at 10 am.
We walked to Tate Britain trying to stay in the shade as we passed near Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.
And Westminster Abbey
Tate Britain getting work on the gardens around it
The exhibition covered Whistler’s career and included many works when he was in his teenage years. Most of those works were on a very small scale. His early success was as a printmaker.
His early training was in Russia when his father was working on an engineering project for the Moscow St Petersburg railway. After his father’s death when Whistler was still young, he enrolled at West Point thinking of a career in the United States military. There he excelled at drawing but did poorly at everything else. He was eventually expelled for not following the rules. The exhibition included some work he did for the military for mapping US coastlines. When he was 30 in 1855, he moved to Paris for art training and never returned to the US.
In Paris, he was friends with Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet and like them, sought to depict everyday life and ordinary people.
But Whistler wanted an environment that was more open to his ideas about art and Paris was ruled by the French art Academy. Whistler moved to London.
The influence of east Asian art, particularly Japanese woodblock prints, was significant in developing his style.
His method shifted from the thick layering of paint, like Impressionists practiced, to scraping or rubbing away paint to thin the application, and then later, to using a very watery-like consistency of paint which he applied in thin layers. It gave his paintings indistinct edges.
He liked to title his paintings with words associated with music as he saw his works as arrangements of paint and not depictions of reality.
His work received harsh criticism from John Ruskin so Whistler sued him for libel. This resulted in financially ruinous legal bills for Whistler. (This is a common story in the legal land of defamation.)
Whistler left London and began travelling and eventually producing books of prints showing places like Venice.
It was interesting to see his small sketchbooks.
He also earned money by public speaking about his ideas about art which can be summed up as art for art’s sake. His skill over a range of artistic media is impressive: etching, lithograph, watercolour, oil, pastel.
The exhibition included many of his portraits including the one commonly known as Whistler’s Mother, but those tended to be hard to photograph as people were crowded around them.
This self portrait was one of his last.
We went to the Members Room for a light lunch.
Looked at some of the permanent collection. Having just seen the play about Ellen Terry, we looked at John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her as Lady Macbeth.
Also looked in the JWM Turner wing.
Turner was also a good watercolourist
And worked in tiny sketchbooks
The dining room at Tate Britain had a mural painted in the 1920s by Rex Whistler (no relation to James McNeill Whistler) who died in WWII when he was in his 30s. The mural was the only one painted by Rex Whistler but drew criticism for some racist images. The dining room is no longer used as such but has become the subject of a film discussing the controversy.
Leaving Tate Britain was another shade hopping walk.
We considered sketching in the garden by Saint Paul’s
Instead we found a bar along Watling Street
Our last dinner was at City Social, a restaurant by Jason Atherton, one of Gordon Ramsay’s protegés. The location is in Tower 42 on the 24th floor.
I forgot to take any photos of the food.
We then walked back to our apartment to pack up for our flight home.
