Titles

Variant titles have been suggested:

• 'his Reverence' (1903, Whistler). 1
• ‘Portrait des Herrn Richard Canfield’ (1910, Ausstellung Amerikanischer Kunst, Berlin). 2
• 'Portrait of Richard A. Canfield' (1980, YMSM). 3

'Portrait of Richard A. Canfield' is the preferred title.

Description

A head and shoulders portrait of a man with short dark hair, wearing a black coat, against a dark background. His left arm crosses his body, the hand partly visible at the left edge of the canvas. It is in vertical format.

Sitter

Richard Albert Canfield (1855-1914)

Richard A. Canfield, the owner of fashionable gambling houses in New York, Saratoga and Newport, was also a man of culture, and a collector. He sold his very fine collection of works by Whistler to Knoedler’s in 1914 for $300,000. Canfield’s deceptive appearance of respectability caused Whistler to call the portrait ‘His Reverence’. 4

The Pennells disapproved of Whistler's friendship with Canfield, of which they wrote at length:

'Mr. Canfield was sitting at this time again for his portrait, and during his stay in London he was very much in the studio where he was always welcome, not as a sitter only, but even as a friend. He seemed almost to have hypnotised Whistler, whom we heard say once that Canfield was the only man who had never made a mistake in the studio. We could not help regretting this because of Canfield's notorious reputation in New York, and because of the unpleasant things which were being said of Whistler's tolerance of the man. Whistler had been warned, but had sacrificed a friendship of years in his indignation at "a breath of scandal" against any one whom he had introduced to "the Ladies." In the early part of 1903 we received numerous letters and telegrams from correspondents of American papers in London, all re-echoing the question in the big New York dailies "Is Whistler painting gambler Canfield?" Whistler's condition rendered any remark which might excite him impossible, and everybody now hesitated to suggest to him that Canfield was a very public character to include in one's private circle. Canfield's visits did not cease, and the one fact that reconciled us to his presence in the studio was that it resulted in one of Whistler's masterpieces. The portrait, His Reverence, ... is certainly the finest of his later portraits.' 5

In 1908 Canfield sent Charles Lang Freer (1856-1919) a woodcut by Henry Wolf (1852-1916) after Whistler's portrait, and this woodcut is now in the Freer Gallery of Art (F1908.242 a-b). 6