The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler

Date

r.: A Japanese Woman; v.: Girl with parasol date from 1872/1873.

r.: A Japanese Woman, Colby College Museum of Art

They are catalogued in MacDonald 1995 (cat. rais.) [more] (cat. no. 458). The record has been updated.

Images

Technique

Composition

v.: Girl with a parasol, Colby College Museum of Art

The White Symphony: Three Girls, Freer Gallery of Art

The nude study on the verso relates to the right hand figure in The White Symphony: Three Girls y087 and The Three Girls y088.

History

Provenance

• By 1904: owned by the Hon. John Prince Elton (1865-1948);
• 1948: bequeathed to his wife, Elizabeth Deborah Steele Elton (1875-1962), Waterbury, CT;
• 1962: bequeathed to her daughter, Charlotte (Mrs R. M. Cross, 1910-1998);
• 1987: sold to Coe Kerr, New York art dealers;
• 1989: sold to Thomas Colville (n/a) Fine Arts, New York;
• By 1995: sold to a private collector;
• After 2000: bought by Paula Crane Lunder (b. 1935) and Peter H. Lunder (b. 1933);
• 2013: given to Colby College Museum of Art, The Lunder Collection.

The Colby website comments:

'Whistler created this pastel—the first work by the artist to enter the Lunder Collection—as part of an uncompleted mosaic commission for the South Kensington Museum. A second pastel, also for the unrealized commission, shows a Japanese woman painting a fan. The artist in this image, holding a brush in her right hand, has paused in her work, allowing the parasol to gracefully frame her soft features.' ¹

Bibliography

Catalogues Raisonnés

• MacDonald, Margaret F., James McNeill Whistler. Drawings, Pastels and Watercolours. A Catalogue Raisonné, New Haven and London, 1995 (cat. no. 458) as 'r.: A Japanese Woman; v.: Girl with parasol'.

Books on Whistler

• McCann, Justin (ed.), Whistler and the World: The Lunder Collection of James McNeill Whistler at the Colby College of Art, New York, 2015.

Books, General

• MacDonald, Margaret F., 'Collecting Whistler' in Hannah Blunt, Sharon Corwin, Elizabeth Finch, Lauren Lessing and Elizabeth Spear, The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, 2013, pp. 108-143, at p. 129, repr. p. 137.

Catalogues 1906-Present

• ホイスラー展. Whistler Exhibition in Japan, Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum, Shizuoka, 1986 (cat. no. 46).
• The Lunder Collection: A Gift of Art to Colby College, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, exhibition, 2013-2014.

Websites

• Colby College Museum of Art website at https://www.colby.edu/museum.