Detail from The Canal, Amsterdam, 1889, James McNeill Whistler, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow

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M.0717
Study for 'The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland'

Artist: James McNeill Whistler
Date: 1879
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number: 1921.124
Medium: pen and brown ink
Support: cream pseudo-laid paper, tipped onto cream wove paper
Size: 7 1/16 x 4 7/16" (180 x 113 mm)
Signature: butterfly
Inscription: 'Miss Eleanor (sic) Leyland. "Babs". original sketch for a picture never completed, and destroyed by Whistler in the early part of 1879.' written by C. A. Howell on support paper

Study for 'The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland'

Composition

This is a study for the uncompleted and destroyed painting, The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland [YMSM 111].

Technique

Study for 'The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland', Art Institute Of Chicago
Study for 'The Blue Girl: Portrait of Miss Elinor Leyland', Art Institute Of Chicago

This is undoubtedly a drawing by Whistler, possibly done from memory.

It was apparently copied fairly carefully, possibly by Rosa Frances Corder (1853-1893) for Charles Augustus Howell (1840?-1890) : a photograph of the fake is in the Pennell Collection, Library of Congress.

See further details in MacDonald 1995 (cat. rais.) [more] (cat. no. 717), and Clarke, Jay A., and Sarah Kelly Oehler, eds., Whistler Paintings and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, 2020, website (cat. no. 21).

Last updated: 10th December 2020 by Margaret