The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler

Date

Maud Franklin probably dates from between 1875 and 1877. ¹

Maud Franklin, Fogg Art Museum

This date is suggested by the appearance of the model, Maud Franklin (1857-1939), who may only have started posing for Whistler in 1873/1874 when she was 16 or 17. In this portrait she looks several years older.

Images

Subject

Titles

Possible titles suggested:

• 'Maud Franklin' (1980, YMSM). ²
• 'Miss Maud Franklin' (2015, Fogg Art Museum).

'Maud Franklin' is the preferred title.

Description

Maud Franklin Fogg Art Museum

A head and shoulders portrait of a young woman with brown hair cut in a fringe. She stares directly at the viewer, her head very slightly tilted to her left. She is wearing a dark yellow coat with a wide collar; a grey ruff appears to have been added over the coat, round her neck. The portrait is in vertical format.

Sitter

T. R. Way identified this as a portrait of Maud Franklin (1857-1939). ³

Harmony in Grey and Peach Colour , Fogg Art Museum

Maud Franklin Fogg Art Museum

The face is quite like that of Harmony in Grey and Peach Colour y131 in appearance, which also came from Way's collection. It is possible that Way worked on Maud Franklin y132 and assisted the resemblance.

Technique

Technique

Maud Franklin Fogg Art Museum

The canvas was prepared with a grey ground. According to conservation reports by the Fogg Art Museum, Whistler mixed varnish with his paint when painting it, and the portrait was covered with a thick coat of resinous varnish. The paint was applied thinly and evenly, and well worked in to give a matt appearance over the head and ruff.

Way believed this to be one of Whistler's few portraits showing the head and shoulders alone. ⁴ However, since the paint goes right to the edge of the canvas round the stretcher on all sides, it was probably cut from a full-length portrait.

The ruff, or collar, was originally much darker, and appears to have been reworked or added later, possibly not by Whistler.

Conservation History

It has been scrubbed down, and was possibly one of the pictures unfinished, or 'more or less destroyed' by Whistler at the time of his bankruptcy in 1879.

The face is very like that of Harmony in Grey and Peach Colour y131 in appearance, which also came from T. R. Way's collection. It is possible that Way worked on Maud Franklin y132 and assisted the resemblance. He may also have added the thick varnish.

The fine, shiny black outlines of the collar and coat seem to have been a later addition. They do not appear in Way's lithographic reproduction of the painting.

Frame

82.2 x 61.6 x 7.6 cm (32 3/8 x 24 1/4 x 3").

History

Provenance

• 1879: bought for Thomas Way (1837-1915), London;
• 1878/1915: given to his son Thomas Robert Way (1861-1913), London.
• 1939: bequeathed by Hunt Henderson (1869-1939), New Orleans, to Tulane University, New Orleans;
• 1941: sold by them through the Macdonald Gallery, New York, to Grenville Lindell Winthrop (1864-1943), New York, April 1941;
• 1943: bequeathed by him to the Fogg Art Museum.

At the time of Whistler's bankruptcy it was bought by a picture dealer on behalf of the London printer Thomas Way, and given to his son, T. R. Way, who made a colour lithograph of it (The Hunterian, Glasgow). It is not known when T. R. Way sold it, nor when and where Hunt Henderson bought it.

Exhibitions

It is possible that in its original state this was exhibited as a full length portrait, but in its cut-down and rubbed-down state it was certainly not exhibited.

Bibliography

Catalogues Raisonnés

• Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980 (cat. no. 132) as 'Maud Franklin'.

Authored by Whistler

• None.

Catalogues 1855-1905

• None.

Journals 1855-1905

• None.

Monographs

• None.

Books on Whistler

• Spencer, Robin, Whistler, New York, 1990, pp. 88-89.
• Sutton, Denys, Nocturne: The Art of James McNeill Whistler, London, 1963, repr. pl. 47.
• Way, Thomas Robert, Memories of James McNeill Whistler, the Artist, London and New York, 1912, p. 115.

Books, General

• None.

Catalogues 1906-Present

COLLECTION:

• Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr., Virginia Anderson, and Kimberly Orcutt, ed., American Paintings at Harvard, Volume Two, Paintings, Drawings, Pastels and Stained Glass by Artists Born 1826-1856, Cambridge, MA and New Haven, CT, 2008, p. 405-06 (cat. no. 434), repr. p. 406.

Journals 1906-Present

• None.

Websites

• Harvard Art Museums website at http://www.harvardartmuseums.org.

Unpublished

• Revillon, Joseph Whistler, Draft Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of J. McN. Whistler, [ca 1945-1955], Glasgow University Library (cat.no. 147).

Other

• None.