(soft piano music)
- Good evening, and
welcome to this episode
of Cocktails with a Curator.
I am Xavier Salomon, the
Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator
at The Frick Collection in New York.
This evening, I would like to talk about
Whistler's "Portrait of Mrs. Leyland,"
one of the most beautiful
portraits by Whistler
at The Frick Collection.
And I'm showing you here
one of the wonderful
details from this painting,
showing a blossoming
branch of an almond tree.
And this, as other details in
the painting, as we will see,
are directly inspired by Japanese models.
Whistler was very
interested in Japanese art,
especially Japanese prints.
And because of this, I
decided to have a cocktail
this evening with a Japanese twist.
This is a sake highball.
It is basically sake and club soda,
as much or as little
club soda as you like.
You can choose your favorite
sake for this and lots of ice.
And it's a wonderful refreshing drink.
Cheers!
In the last few years of his life,
Henry Clay Frick had moved into the house
at 1 East 70th Street
and acquired a number of Whistler works.
He bought five paintings that
we have in the collection
and a series of works on paper.
We have a great collection of
works on paper by Whistler,
some pastels and mostly etchings.
Here you see two of the
portraits by Whistler,
Mrs. Leyland on the right,
flanking, rather surprisingly,
Gilbert Stuart's portrait
of George Washington.
This is a room that you
wouldn't find today at the Frick
because even though
this was Frick's office,
it was demolished to make way in the 1930s
for a new gallery,
which was designed by the
architect John Russell Pope
and built in time for
the opening of the museum
to the public in 1935.
And this is what we know
today as the Oval Room.
And this is the room in
which we usually display
the five Whistler paintings.
Here again are those two same portraits
that were in the office,
flanking, in this case,
Whistler's "Ocean."
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
is probably one of the
most important painters
of what we now know as
the Aesthetic Movement.
He was a great proponent
of art for art's sake.
And even though he was born in America,
he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts,
he moved as a young man to Europe
and spent all of his life
between Paris and London.
The portrait of Mrs.
Leyland is directly related
to one of Whistler's greatest
patrons in the 1870s,
a man called Frederick Richards Leyland.
Leyland was a shipowner from Liverpool,
and later in his life he owned
as many as 25 steamships.
He was a very wealthy man
but also a great patron of the arts.
He was particularly fond of
Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
And, of course, here you
see him in a portrait
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
one of the great Pre-Raphaelite
painters, from about 1879.
But he was also a great
patron of Edward Burne-Jones,
and this is the great wonderful
"Beguiling of Merlin,"
painted again in the
1870s, between 1872-77,
and it's now in the
Lady Lever Art Gallery,
in Port Sunlight in England.
And it shows one of the episodes
from the legend of King Arthur.
Leyland was so close to Burne-Jones
that Burne-Jones ended up
designing the grave of Leyland
where he was buried in the
Brompton Cemetery in London.
And this is a unique case.
We don't have anything else
like this by Burne-Jones.
So the fact that he ended
up providing designs
for this wonderful tomb
shows how close the two artists were.
Leyland owned a large house near Liverpool
called Speke Hall,
and it was a large Tudor home,
which you see in this
etching here by Whistler.
But he also owned a house
in London at Princes Gate.
The etching shows the
house in the background
and this beautiful detail of a woman
walking in the front of the etching.
And this, of course, is Mrs. Leyland.
Frederick Leyland married,
in 1855, Frances Dawson.
And she, as well as her husband,
was close to a series of artists.
So in the 1870s, Leyland
commissions from Whistler
this grand portrait of himself.
This was called "Arrangement in Black:
Portrait of Frederick Richards Leyland."
Many, as we will see, almost
all of Whistler's works,
have as titles musical words.
So they're either called
arrangement or symphony
or sometimes nocturne.
They have always titles that were usually
associated with musical titles,
rather than titles of works of art.
So Leyland becomes close
to Whistler in the 1870s,
so does his wife.
He commissions this portrait,
and he decides to ask for a
portrait of his wife as well.
She had sat just before for Rossetti,
for the Pre-Raphaelite painter,
for this image, this
painting, called "Monna Rosa,"
"The Lady of the Roses."
"Monna," of course, is
like the "Mona Lisa,"
it's an old-fashioned term
for lady from medieval Italy.
And, of course, she is
arranging this beautiful
bunch of roses in this
blue and white Chinese jar.
This is not a straightforward
portrait of Mrs. Leyland,
but she provided the model
and inspiration for it.
And two versions existed of this portrait.
One is, unfortunately, lost now.
We don't know where it is.
And this is in a private collection.
But Leyland commissions
after his own portrait
a pendant portrait of his wife.
And the two were meant to go together,
one in black, one in pink.
Unfortunately, they are now separate.
The one at the Frick, of
course, the one of Mrs. Leyland,
and the one of Mr. Leyland,
at the Freer Art Gallery
in Washington, D.C.
The portrait of Mrs. Leyland
was commissioned in 1871 and
painted up to about 1874,
when it was exhibited in
the first solo exhibition
that Whistler had at the time in London.
And this was an exhibition that
was largely sponsored by Mr. Leyland.
Whistler, however, never considered
the painting altogether finished,
and he was not entirely happy with it,
which is surprising to us,
as this is one of the
most beautiful portraits
that Whistler ever painted.
But he was planning to
sort of go back to it
and work on it some more.
Mrs. Leyland is shown in this
beautiful statuesque pose
from the back, but her face in profile.
Whistler made a series of sketches,
we have many drawings, mainly in pastel,
showing details of this portrait,
and showing Mrs. Leyland
from different angles.
And in this case, a detail of the flowers
that were attached to her
dress in the portrait.
But the final image
is slightly different from the drawings
and shows her from the back.
But it is a great work of art as a whole.
And Whistler also, as he often did,
designed the frame for it.
So we have the original frame.
The Whistlers at the Frick are among
the very few paintings in the museum
that have still their original frames.
And if you look carefully at
the bottom part of the picture,
you realize that the floor
has this pattern of squares
which is then repeated in the frame.
So the whole thing was
conceived as a single object,
a sort of beautiful object.
Mrs. Leyland joked later in life
that she wanted to be portrayed
in a very beautiful elegant
black dress that she had,
but Whistler insisted for
her to wear this dress,
which he designed himself.
And Whistler and Mrs.
Leyland were very close.
In fact, Whistler, for a while,
was engaged to Mrs. Leyland's
younger sister, Elizabeth,
but the two broke up,
apparently quite amicably
after this short-lived engagement.
And it was rumored for a long time
that Whistler and Mrs.
Leyland were too close, maybe.
And even though we don't have any evidence
that the two were actual lovers,
it was widely believed
in London at the time
that that was the case.
And the fact that they were so close
is witnessed by a series of letters.
And just to give you one example,
in August 1871, Whistler is in London
and writes to Mrs. Leyland,
who is away from the city,
he says, "What shall I tell you
of this dreary waste they call London?
You seem to have carried away with you
not only the life and the joy of the place
but even the sun too."
So clearly Mrs. Leyland acted as a muse,
as an inspiration for Whistler.
And as I said, the two were
very close in the 1870s.
The portrait is a beautiful work of art.
Here is Mrs. Leyland in profile,
her famous auburn hair
gathered up high over her head.
And she is wearing this
dress that Whistler designed.
But the dress is also echoed,
the flowers of the dress
are echoed in the almond blossoms
that come in from the side to the left,
in this beautiful Japanese touch.
The hands of Mrs. Leyland
are gathered at the back
of her body in this sort
of very elegant pose.
And here is this gown
covered in these little sort of flowers.
And you can see this sort
of diaphanous texture
of the cloth with which this gown is made.
And again, some details
of the beautiful blossoms.
And Whistler always signed
his works with a butterfly,
this stylized Japanese-like
butterfly that you see
in the bottom right
corner of the painting.
Now, Whistler's relationship
with the Leylands
is directly linked to the
creation of one of the most
famous works of art
that Whistler ever made,
the so-called Peacock Room.
In fact, the Peacock Room was entitled
"Harmony in Blue and Gold."
And this was a commission
from Leyland in the mid-1870s,
when he was considering the refurbishment
of the house at Princes Gate.
And he decided to ask
Whistler to collaborate
with his architect to
decorate the dining room.
Whistler took over,
and what was originally envisioned
as a fairly minor
intervention in the space
turned out into a large
change of the room,
entirely decorated with
images of peacocks,
hence the name of the Peacock Room.
And here you see the
shutters of the windows.
The room was destined
to hold the collection
of porcelain that the Leylands had,
especially blue-and-white porcelain.
But the room was a breaking point
between patron and artist.
The two fought because of money,
because of the fact that
Mr. Leyland did not agree
with what Whistler had
done at the Peacock Room.
And even though Whistler
did eventually complete
the Peacock Room in 1877,
this represented the break
of the relationship between the two.
And it was also rumored that, of course,
Whistler's closeness to
Mrs. Leyland did not help.
As a final touch in the room,
Whistler painted the two fighting peacocks
at the end of the dining room,
with the idea that the one on the left,
of course, is Whistler himself,
and the one on the right,
covered in gold coins,
and with gold coins on the
floor, was Mr. Leyland.
The relationship soured so
badly that in the later 1870s,
Whistler painted this very
funny portrait of Leyland
called "The Gold Scab:
Eruption in Frilthy Lucre."
He calls it "Frilthy Lucre"
because Leyland was very well known
for his frilly shirts
that he loved wearing.
And so here is Leyland himself,
as this grotesque peacock
playing the piano.
This is a painting now
at the Legion of Honor
museum in San Francisco.
But it shows how sour
the relationship went.
Whistler expected money from
Leyland that he never received.
In 1879, Whistler goes bankrupt,
partly to do with this.
And that is the same year
when Mr. and Mrs. Leyland
separate and they spend the
rest of their lives apart,
even though they had
four children together.
And eventually, Mrs.
Leyland inherited the house
and she was the one who
then sold the Peacock Room
to the collector in America, Freer,
who then reinstalled the
room, first in Detroit,
and then at the Freer Art
Gallery in Washington,
where it is today.
Just as an aside, the Peacock
Room is also the inspiration
for this wonderful
contemporary installation,
great work of art, called "Filthy Lucre,"
by Darren Waterston, who is a good friend
and who has lectured at
the Frick previously.
And this was an installation
which was originally done
for MASS MoCA but was also shown
at the Freer Art Gallery in Washington.
And it's currently at the
Victoria and Albert Museum
in London.
And once the museum reopens,
I hope you will all go and see this,
because it is a very clever meditation
on the relationship between
Leyland and Whistler
and Whistler's great work of art,
and the tension between the two.
And so this is a sort of life-size replica
of the Peacock Room
but with the peacocks fighting
and all sorts of disturbing elements.
And there is a wonderful music piece
that's associated with this.
And it's a very clever
play on this relationship.
But back to Mrs. Leyland.
This, when it was exhibited in
1874, had the beautiful title
of "Symphony in Flesh Color and Pink."
So the same way that the portrait
of Mr. Leyland was an arrangement,
and that the Peacock Room is a harmony,
this is a symphony.
And it has this very beautiful
musical aspect to it.
When Dante Gabriel
Rossetti saw the painting,
he said, "I cannot see that
it is at all a likeness."
So it is not even a portrait.
It's almost this beautiful image,
so steeped in Japanese fashion and ideas,
and one of the quintessential
portraits by Whistler.
I hope you're all enjoying
your sake highball,
and I hope to see you all again next week
with another Cocktails with a Curator.
Good evening.
