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

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YMSM 260
Note in Flesh Colour and Grey: Portrait of Miss Dorothy Menpes

Artist: James McNeill Whistler
Date: 1884/1885
Collection: Private Collection
Accession Number: none
Medium: oil
Support: wood
Size: 21.6 x 12.7 cm (8 1/2 x 5")
Signature: butterfly
Inscription: 'My Goddaughter / Dorothy Whistler Menpes.'

Note in Flesh Colour and Grey: Portrait of Miss Dorothy Menpes

Titles

One title has been suggested:

  • 'Note in Fleshcolour and grey; Portrait of Miss Dorothy Menpes' (1885, Society of British Artists). 1
  • 'Note in Flesh Colour and Grey: Portrait of Miss Dorothy Menpes' (1980, YMSM). 2

Description

Note in Flesh Colour and Grey: Portrait of Miss Dorothy Menpes, Whereabouts unknown
Note in Flesh Colour and Grey: Portrait of Miss Dorothy Menpes, Whereabouts unknown

A portrait in vertical format. A toddler stands looking at the viewer, wearing a black shoe on her left foot, her right foot bare. She has short blonde hair, big dark eyes (a rather startled expression). She wears a crumpled white pinafore with a white ruffle over an off-white dress with a wide skirt, decorated round the hem with a pattern of blue flowers and green leaves. Her right arm stretches out to the side, the other, in front of her. Her right hand (at left) is barely visible. She may be being held up or supported. Her left hand is also holding something, maybe holding up an apron. The floor is a reddish brown and the background a darker brown.

Sitter

Dorothy Whistler Menpes (1884-1973) (Mrs Flower). She was the second daughter of Rosa Mary Menpes (1855-1936) and Whistler's pupil and follower Mortimer Luddington Menpes (1860-1938).

There were seven daughters and three sons. The family included Maud Rose Goodwin (1878-1958), Mortimer James (1879-1900), Dorothy Whistler (1883-1973), Walter Mortimer (1886-1945), and Claude (1892-1963).

Several children appear in an 1887 etching by Whistler, The Menpes Children [300], which probably includes Maud and Dorothy, and just possibly the Menpes' fourth child, Walter. For Whistler's portrait of her brother, see Master Menpes [YMSM 261]. Another member of this circle of young artists, Théodore Roussel (1847-1926), exhibited a portrait of Miss Menpes at the New English Art Club in 1887.

Dorothy married Ivan Charles Flower (1884-1966) and had two children, Pamela (1916-1969) and Richard Herbert Gordon Menpes Flower (1910-1979). Walter married Joan, and they had one son, Michael Mortimer Menpes; both parents died in 1945, and Michael, ca 1994. Claude married Winifred Kate (d. 1972) who inherited a collection of Menpes' works, which went to a gallery in Reading, UK.

Notes:

1: Winter Exhibition, Society of British Artists, London, 1885 (cat. no. 231). In this catalogue raisonné Whistler's title or the first published title is retained, wherever possible. Whistler’s use of “flesh colour” to describe colour, as here, could imply a racist presumption that skin tone is defined as 'white' or Caucasian. In this case it presumably means the pale cream or pink of the child's skin.

2: YMSM 1980 [more] (cat. no. 260).

Last updated: 29th April 2021 by Margaret