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
Notes:
1: YMSM 1980 [more] (cat. no. 111).
2: Stubbs 1948 [more] , revised 1967, p. 13.
3: Pennell 1908 [more] , vol. 1, pp. 175-176.
4: Whistler to Frances Leyland, [27/31 August 1871], GUW #08051.
5: Duret 1904 [more] , drawings repr. pp. 53, 198; Pennell 1908 [more] , vol 1, repr. f.p. 174; Pennell 1911 A [more] , pp. 124, 186; Pennell 1921C [more] , p. 134.
Last updated: 25th November 2020 by Margaret
