Titles

One main title predominates:

• 'The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland' (1980, YMSM). 1

However, this painting was destroyed except for one section cut from the lower right-hand side of the original canvas and another from the lower left-hand side. These were given the titles 'Yellow and Blue' and 'Purple and Blue' respectively, in the Freer catalogue written by Burns A. Stubbs. 2

Description

The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland, fragment, Freer Gallery of Art

The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland, fragment, Freer Gallery of Art

The two surviving fragments show blue and white Chinese porcelain with flowers.

Sitter

Elinor Leyland (1861-1952) was born on 16 October 1861.

According to the Pennells, Frederick Richards Leyland (1832-1892) commissioned a large full-length portrait of his youngest daughter 'Babs' or 'Baby' Elinor Leyland (1861-1952). 3

Study for a portrait of Baby Leyland, Freer Gallery of Art

She was a favourite subject: Whistler made many drawings of her. He wrote to her mother, 'how delighted I was to see again the lovely Babs - really that child is exasperatin[g]ly lovely.' 4

The oil portrait of Elinor was one of a sequence of 'Blue Girls' (see Annabel Lee [YMSM 079], The Blue Girl: Maud Franklin [YMSM 112]). In the later editions of Pennell (1911, 1920, and 1921) the portrait under discussion was mistakenly identified as Florence Leyland, and both Duret and Pennell (1908) identified drawings of Elinor as Florence. 5