Provenance

• Date unknown: given by Henry Irving (1838-1905) to Ellen Terry (1847-1928) , London;
• After 1905: bought by Scott & Fowles, New York dealers;
• 1921: bought from Scott & Fowles by the Cincinnati Art Museum;
• 1945: sold at auction, Parke-Bernet, New York, 18 October 1945 (lot 37), and bought by Macbeth Galleries, New York;
• 1945/1946: bought by Carolyn Glendenin Foulke (née Ryan) (1910-1987) , Florida;
• 1987: passed to the estate of C. R. Foulke;
• 1990: sold at auction, Sotheby’s, New York, 29 November 1990 (lot 77).
• By 2001: with Jonathan ('Jack') Westervelt Warner (1917-2017), Jack Warner Collection, (Gulf States Paper Corporation, now the Westervelt Company), Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
• 2013: private collection;
• 2015: Thomas Colville (n/a) , Thomas Colville Fine Art, New Haven and New York;
• 2017: purchased by the National Gallery of Australia with the assistance of Allan and Maria Myers, Andrew and Tracey Sisson, the American Friends of the NGA with the support of the Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation and the Neilson Foundation.

According to museum records, it was bought by the actor Henry Irving for £30.0.0 and given by him to the actress Ellen Terry, who sold it to Scott & Fowles. It is not clear when and where the painting was acquired or sold by the Jack Warner Collection, which owned it in 2001.

Exhibitions

• 1886: 'Notes' - 'Harmonies' - 'Nocturnes', Second Series, Messrs Dowdeswell, London, 1886 (cat. no. 1) as 'Harmony in blue and pearl. The Sands, Dieppe'.

In 1886 the price of 'Harmony in blue and pearl The Sands, Dieppe' was estimated at £60 by Dowdeswell but finally priced at £30.0.0 by Whistler. 1

The Saturday Review on 22 May 1886 commented on 'the aerial sands and liquid water of the Harmony in Blue and Pearl (1), a strongly painted oil upright'. The Magazine of Art called it 'a solid oil upright, which is more than decorative, and gives admirably the flat, oily surface of a miniature lagoon inside the breaking waves on a flat sandy coast.' 2 A correspondent of the Dundee Evening Telegraph wrote even more admiringly, on 27 May 1886:

'Some of the drawings are particularly graceful and harmonious; one, for example, "A Harmony in Blue and Pearl – The Sands, Dieppe", gives the true feeling of sea and sky as none but a poet amongst painters could have ever seen it.'