At the age of twenty-one Whistler made a self-conscious and deliberate decision to become a professional artist. When he left the United States for France in 1855, he associated himself with Gustav Courbet, Charles Baudelaire, and other avant-garde painters and poets in Paris. He also maintained a close relationship with his half-sister Deborah Haden and her family in London. In 1858, at the urging of Deborahās husband, the surgeon and amateur etcher Francis Seymour Haden, Whistler began a series of etchings in which figures read, play music, or daydream in a domestic interior.
In the nearly half-century that followed, Whistlerās artistic style underwent a significant change. He detached himself from the realism of Courbet, embraced the āart for artās sakeā ideals of British aestheticism, and developed an increasingly abstract approach to representation. He also continued to explore and refine favorite motifs. Images of reading and making music allowed Whistler to depict figures whose concentrated attention seems to block out the surrounding world.
Whistler was also fascinated by the sense of reverie conveyed by pensive women in languid poses. A drawing of young Weary of the artistās mistress Jo Hiffernan exemplify this interest. The late lithograph Nude Model, Reclining, the woman seems unaware of being observed, while the artistās presence is implied by a sketchy, evocative touch. Some of Whistlerās earliest studio images, however, are constructed as self-portraits that give the viewer a ābehind-the-scenesā glimpse of the generally private spaces in which concentrated attention, associated with both reverie and artistic creativity, is exercised.
All of these works are by the American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler (1834ā1903) and are the Gift of Charles Lang Freer.