WHISTLER SOCIETY NEWSLETTER No 20 December 2018

Joyeux Noël!

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Whistler Society www.whistlersociety.org

Hon Patrons: Dr. Stephen Bury, Frick Collection, New York; Dr. Lee Glazer, Director Lunder Institute, Maine; Sir Charles

Saumarez Smith, Royal Academy, London; Professor Margaret MacDonald, Glasgow University, Gordon

Cooke.

Patrons: Lady Armstrong of Ilminster; William Loschert; Laurent Lourson; Pemberton Greenish; Sloane Stanley Estate,

John Thacker.

Chairman’s Christmas message:

It would be invidious to single out any event as being a highlight of the year such was the quality and variety of our calendar, so I will

leave it those attending to make their judgements.

The nature of our membership and the spiritual home that is the Chelsea Arts Club means that most of our events take place in

London, but we did manage a foray into Warwickshire in the autumn to see the magnificent exhibition at Compton Verney curated

by our dear friend Dr Patricia de Montfort of the University of Glasgow. Whistler and Nature was a fine collection of prints and

paintings and was very well reviewed in the arts press.

There was flamboyant theatricality when an extract from the Ruskin Trial was re-enacted in ‘The Ladies’ Bar’ at the Chelsea Arts

Club in late November with His Honour Judge Owen-Jones playing Sir John Holker, Ruskin’s barrister, and Darcy Sullivan as

Whistler himself. This event was the brainchild of out late chairman David Le Lay - it was a splendid performance and worthy of a

larger audience in the future. Darcy’s physical similarity to Whistler caused many club members to draw breath and be rendered

speechless, almost unheard of in Old Church Street.

I’m extremely pleased to report that our membership shows a steady rise and our finances are in good order and we have the bones of

another busy year’s events in place.

2019 will see the publication of the second issue of The Ten O’Clock with a range of authors from Daniel Sutherland and his

research on Whistler’s non-election to the Royal Academy, Jeremy Musson on Whistler’s work at Aubrey House for the

Alexanders, and Kenneth McConkey on the influence of Whistler on the work of his friend Sir John Lavary.

As always, the society relies upon the enthusiasm of the members of the committee and we all recognise that we could not function

without the industrious determination of our Honorary Secretary, Simon Wartnaby. So, my sincere thanks to all within our Society

and to the officers and staff of the Chelsea Arts Club who make us so welcome and give their time and expertise both willingly and

cheerfully.

With my very best wishes to you all for Christmas and the New Year.

Martin Riley

Cover: Darcy Sullivan and French TV crew at Cheyne Walk - See Whistler v Ruskin Comes to French TV below.

CHRISTMAS GIFT MEMBERSHIP OF THE WHISTLER SOCIETY

If you would like to give a gift of annual membership, we will arrange to send a Whistler card and copy of the

current journal. For more information contact enquiries@whistlersociety.org.

DATES FOR YOUR DIARY - SOCIETY EVENTS

EXHIBITION CHRISTINA ROSSETTI: VISION & VERSE, Watts Gallery

The Society will be planning some visits early next year including to our friends at the Watts Gallery to see the

Christina Rossetti exhibtion. Whistler was great friends of the Rosetti brothers – Dante Gabriel and Michael, the

art critic, and with the former shared the same interests in art, design and collecting oriental ceramics. The

design principles can be found in Dante Gabriel’s book cover and illustrations for the Christina’s books. We will

also visit the conservation studio.

RECENT SOCIETY EVENTS

WHISTLER AND NATURE at Compton Verney.

In November members of the society visited the exhibtion at Compton Verney - Whistler and Nature curated

by Dr Patricia de Montfort. The magnificent house with its Robert Adam alterations and the picturesque

Capability Brown landscape shone brightly with an autumnal sun glinting on the lake. It was a superb setting for

the exhibition shown the exhibtion by Patricia with lunch in the handsome Adam hall followed by a lecture by

Patricia.

WHISTLER v RUSKIN 140TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION AND DINNER

On Wednesday 21st November the society celebrated the 140th anniversary of the Whistler v Ruskin trial (25 &

26 November 1878) at the Chelsea Arts Club. There was a reading of extracts of the cross examination of

Whistler (played by Darcy Sullivan) by Ruskin’s lawyer, Sir John Holker (played by His Honour Judge Owen

Jones). A video clip of the conclusion of the reading can be viewed on the Whistler Society YouTube channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuGq8z2PD30. Members dined at the club afterwards.

WHISTLER V RUSKIN COMES TO FRENCH TV

Darcy Sullivan writes:

Why did James Whistler sue John Ruskin in 1878? How did Ruskin’s lawyers try to win by attacking Whistler’s art? What did the resolution of this case mean for Whistler and our view of art?

One week after dramatizing part of the trial for the Whistler Society dinner in late November, I found myself answering these questions in a very different location: at the base of Battersea Bridge, on a cold and windy Saturday morning. The French TV programme Invitation au Voyage interviewed me discussing the trial while dressed in my Whistlerian best.

My favourite moment occurred when the cameraman filmed me walking along the southern bank of the Thames. A couple in their 70s was sitting on a bench at the base of Battersea Bridge, and as I approached the man asked, “Are you Whistler?”

The segment on the Whistler v Ruskin trial is due to air in March, and I will share the link with the Society.

EXHIBITIONS at the FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM, CAMBRIDGE

Print REbels: Haden, Palmer, Whistler and the origins of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers

& Amateur Etcher of Distinction: Prints by Francis Seymour Haden both until 6 January

WHISTLER AND NATURE, From 8 January – 17 March 2019

The exhibition from Compton Verney will transfer to the Fitzwilliam.

A STUDY DAY at the Fitzwilliam. Monday 11 March 2019

There is a study day that begins with a guided tour around the exhibition Whistler & Nature by the art historian who conceived the show, Dr Patricia de Montfort from Glasgow University. Plus, there will be a complementary visit to Cambridge University Botanic Garden the following morning, 12 March, which is free to Study Day attendees. £12.50

EXHIBITION REVIEW - EDWARD BURNE-JONES, TATE BRITAIN until 24 February 2019

'Love Among the Ruins', 1873, Edward Burne-Jones © Private Collection

Review courtesy of The Arts Desk: Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Britain review - time for a rethink? Wide-ranging exhibition of idiosyncratic English artist, both loved and loathed by Katherine Waters Monday, 12 November 2018

When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have

been expected that the course of his life would change so radically. His mother having died in childbirth, he was brought up by his

father, a not particularly successful picture- and mirror-framer in the then mocked industrial city of Birmingham. Early on at King

Edward’s School he was marked out as a pupil of promise and transferred to the classics department which enabled him to attend

university and prepare for a career in the Church. Yet he never took his degree, instead deciding, along with his close college friend

and lifelong collaborator, William Morris (the two pictured together, below) to dedicate himself to a different type of public service –

through art.

Tate Britain holds an extensive collection of Burne-Jones’s work; a number of his pieces

have been on almost permanent view since they were first acquired. In private hands,

Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s collection is unrivalled. Yet for such an influential English artist,

he has been quite neglected. This is the first large exhibition of his work in London since

1975 – his 1998 centenary was marked with an exhibition in Birmingham only. There’s

no hiding that he remains as divisive an artist now as during his lifetime – though perhaps

the reasons for vehement admiration or vituperative dislike have shifted somewhat.

Tate Britain’s exhibition focuses on his influences and developing craftsmanship in a show

that ranges from his earliest illustrations through to his late tapestries. Two of Burne-

Jones’s cycles, The Briar Rose c. 1890, which draws on Charles Perrault’s fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, the panels of which depict a

court frozen in time, and the unfinished Perseus (started 1875, commissioned by the young then-MP Arthur Balfour), occupy entire

halls. Other rooms are dedicated to portraits, exhibition paintings, and sketches. The Wine of Circe, 1869, and Love Among the

Ruins, 1873, both of which brought him to prominence in different ways, glimmer darkly.

After leaving Oxford, Burne-Jones apprenticed himself to Dante Gabriel Rosetti, who encouraged him to follow his own vision. As a

largely self-taught artist unconstrained by the dictates of the Academy, Burne-Jones chose subjects of academic, but not at that time

artistic interest. Early work he later repudiated included illustrations for Archibald Maclaren’s The Fairy Family, which contained

ballads and fairy tales from Europe. But he returned to related subjects - particularly mediaeval – time and again. Refrains

intersperse the exhibition to surprising effect: the power dynamics of Merlin and Nimue, 1861, are reworked into The Beguiling of

Merlin, 1877, while Phyllis and Demophoön, 1870, becomes The Tree of Forgiveness, 1882 – effectively the same painting but

masking Demophoön’s full-frontal nudity with a knot of fabric – a mark of how much the scandal surrounding the earlier version

burned.

In keeping with his literary taste, he painted and repainted episodes from Arthurian myth and for inspiration drew on works by

Geoffrey Chaucer, such as The Romaunt of the Rose and Assembly of Fowls. However, his studies bear the hallmarks of his great

admiration for Dürer and his paintings frequently carry over this hallucinogenic crispness. Also apparent – and this is tracked

beautifully through the exhibition – is the influence of his four trips to Italy, in the course of which he studied the work of Botticelli,

Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, in 1871 spending an entire day lying on his back staring at the Sistine Chapel ceiling

through opera glasses.

It was not just his subject matter that was unconventional. He was a dedicated and experimental colourist. Again, this was by no

means met with universal acclaim or acceptance. His rival Whistler quipped "Didn't I always say the man knew nothing about

painting... They take his oils for water-colours and his water-colours for oils,” and following a number of scraps, he resigned from the

Watercolour Society in 1870. He eventually settled on a favoured combination of watercolour and gouache (oil left him feeling sick)

which allowed him to work his paintings to a luminously spangled decorative flatness. The resulting chromatic richness shows in Love

Among the Ruins, 1894, which, while being photographed for exhibition at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Artes in Paris, was

ruinously treated with albumen for extra glaze on the assumption that it was oil (the painting was later restored with ox gall).

The technical chemical aspect of his paintings are equally remarkable. He sought out the newest pigments,

including cobalt blue, green-blue ceruleum, Field’s vermillion, and violet, which not only enhanced his

paintings’ lapidary gleam, but also kept them stable. He disparaged his erstwhile mentor Rosetti’s conscious

use of degradable paint and was fastidious in following the research conducted by chemist George Field into the

newest, stablest and most durable pigments – The Golden Stairs, 1876-1880, for instance, has never

required restoration.

Burne-Jones's reported remark, "a good artist ought to work only for public purposes; but no private person

ought to own pictures," sits at odds with the fact that he painted the social set and was patronised by the great

and good of his time. But on display, too, are examples of his stained glass which grace many churches around

England (such as The Calling of St Peter, c. 1857, pictured right). He was alive at a time when

industrialisation was bringing fine art and craftsmanship into closer relation – much in the way digitisation is reshaping those

relations now – and was able to experiment and work between civic and private projects throughout his life. Love him or loathe him,

Burne-Jones was an idiosyncratic artist whose place in the history of English fine and decorative art is brought to light in this wide-

ranging and absorbing exhibition.

YouTube - WHISTLER SOCIETY channel

In October the society launched its YouTube channel – with a short videoclip from a visit the Society made to Michelle Avison’s Slaughterhaus studio in 2017 for a demonstration of the process of etching and lithography. The second video clip is the conclusion from the Whistler v Ruskin reading at the Chelsea Arts Club last month.

FINE ART SOCIETY at Sothebys

After 142 years on New Bond Street, one of London’s oldest commercial art galleries, The Fine Art Society, is to offer a selection of works which both encapsulate and celebrate their history on Bond Street. The sale is on 5 February will include pieces by some of the most prominent artists, printmakers, architect-designers and craftsmen of the last 150 years; from James McNeil Whistler, to Sir Peter Blake, work from luminary artists will help tell the story of this unique London institution.

The sale includes ten Whistler etchings (lots 74-82, and 254) and a lithograph (lot 202). Also included is the

drawing, print and folio table (see above) designed by George Faulkner Armitage for the remodelling of the

front gallery of the Fine Art Society in 1888 as can be seen above right. Viewing will be from Friday 1 to

Monday 4 February.