The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler

Date

Note in Red: The Siesta dates from between 1883 and 1884, and was exhibited in 1884. ¹

According to art dealers' records, it was a portrait of Maud Franklin (1857-1939) painted about 1882/1883. The signature suggests a marginally later date of 1883/1884. It was known to the compilers of the 1980 catalogue raisonné only from a photograph, but has been seen since it was acquired by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

Note in Red: The Siesta, Terra Foundation for American Art

Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple, Cincinnati Art Museum

The same chaise longue appears in Red and Pink: La Petite Mephisto y255 and Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple y324, and the signature is also similar in the latter.

It was first exhibited at 'Notes' - 'Harmonies' - 'Nocturnes', Messrs Dowdeswell, London, 1884 (cat. no. 17).

Images

Subject

Titles

Several possible titles have been recorded:

• 'Note in red – The Siesta' (1884, Dowdeswell). ²
• Possibly 'Eine rote Stimmung' (1888, Internationale Kunst-Ausstellung, Munich). ³
• 'A Red Note – The Sofa' (1889, Wunderlich). ⁴
• 'La Note Rouge' (1891, Whistler). ⁵
• 'La Note Rouge' (1904, Copley Society, Boston). ⁶
• 'La Note Rouge' (1905, ISSPG). ⁷
• 'Note in Red: The Siesta' (1980, YMSM). ⁸

'Note in Red: The Siesta' is the preferred title.

Description

Note in Red: The Siesta, Terra Foundation for American Art

An interior in horizontal format. It shows a woman in a white dress, facing away from the viewer, lying on a chaise longue covered in a red patterned material. Her head is at left, resting on the high end of the sofa. She has a red shawl clasped over her body, and there is a pink cloth flung over the back of the sofa at right.

Sitter

Probably Maud Franklin (1857-1939).

Technique

Technique

Note in Red: The Siesta, Terra Foundation for American Art

One of the most vivid of Whistler's small panels, with rich colour and free, fresh brushstrokes. The paint is at times creamy (as on the pink shawl) and at others the brush is almost dry (as on the patterned sofa, where the pale grey ground forms the background for a variety of slashes and blobs and scrapes of red paint). The face, in profile to right, and hair, pulled up into a bun, are painted more carefully, with a small brush.

The Terra Foundation discusses this painting as follows:

'Quickly and sketchily executed in a nervous series of long brushstrokes, Maud’s recumbent form, enclosed within a voluptuous swathe of dress fabric and upholstery, suggests an unposed moment, a siesta for the weary model, whose voluminous skirt trails carelessly along the floor as she rests with her face turned from the viewer. The setting is unspecified, as if the painting is deliberately unfinished; above the back edge of the sofa, the stylized butterfly, … asserts the reality of the flat panel surface on which the artist has pictured the scene.' ⁹

Frame

40.0 x 47.6 cm (15 3/4 x 18 3/4").

History

Provenance

• 1891: bought from the artist by David Croal Thomson (1855-1930) of the Goupil Gallery, London;
• 1891: sold by Goupil's, Paris, to George Alexander Drummond (1829-1910), Montreal;
• 1910: passed to Drummond's estate;
• 1919: auctioned at Drummond sale, Christie's, London, 27 June 1919 (lot 166), and bought by Alexander Reid (1854-1928), Glasgow art dealer.
• Date unknown: owned at some time by E. R. Workman (dates unknown), London.
• 1924: sold by Knoedler, New York dealers, to Stevenson & Scott, New York dealers.
• 1926: with Scott & Fowles, New York dealers.
• 1939: bequeathed by Hunt Henderson (1869-1939), New Orleans, to Tulane University, New Orleans;
• Before October 1945: sold through the Macdonald Gallery, New York, to Martin Birnbaum (1878-1970), Westport, Connecticut, acting on behalf of Grenville Lindell Winthrop (1864-1943), New York.
• Date unknown: owned by Mrs Mary Gay Labrot Leonhardt (later Mrs Sherrod) (d. 1978), wife of (1) Robert Leonhardt, and (2) Robert Lee Sherrod (died 1994, aged 86; former editor of the Saturday Evening Post);
• 1978: passed to her children Gay Leonhardt (dates unknown) and Clifton Leonhardt (dates unknown);
• 1982: sold to the Davis & Langdale Company, Inc., New York;
• 1982: bought by Daniel J. Terra (1911-1996), Daniel J. Terra Collection, Chicago, Illinois;
• 1999: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.

It was valued at 100 gns (£105.0.0) for the Wunderlich exhibition of 1889 in New York, but not sold, and returned to Whistler in London. ¹⁰

D. C. Thomson bought 'La Note Rouge' from Whistler for £80, and sent it to the Goupil branch in Paris for exhibition 'privately' in September 1891, after Whistler sent instructions: 'Kindly write to the house in Paris - and say that I should not like these pictures to be openly exhibited at present, but that they are to be shown by themselves, as you would show them, to special clients in a very choice and careful way.' ¹¹ Thomson sent Whistler a cheque on 5 January 1892. ¹²

It was bought by Sir George A. Drummond on 21 December 1891. After Drummond's death on 2 February 1910, it presumably passed to his estate. It was returned to the UK and exhibited by D. C. Thomson at Barbizon House, London, in 1919 (cat. no. 19). At the Drummond sale at Christie's, 27 June 1919 (lot 166) it was bought by Reid for £945.0.0.

The later provenance is slightly less clear, but it was with Knoedler's in New York on 15 January 1924, and sold by them to Stevenson & Scott on 16 May 1924. According to a photograph in the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, two years later it was with Scott & Fowles.

It is not known when it was acquired by Hunt Henderson, but he bequeathed it with works from his collection to Tulane University in 1939. After it was sold by Tulane it was bought by G. L. Winthrop. Most of the paintings acquired by Winthrop were bequeathed to the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, but they did not include this oil. Presumably it was sold after his death in 1943 but, again, it is not known when it was bought by Mrs Mary Gay Labrot Leonhardt Sherrod; after her ownership, the provenance is clear. From 2005 it was on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago, except when away for exhibition.

Exhibitions

• 1884: 'Notes' - 'Harmonies' - 'Nocturnes', Messrs Dowdeswell, London, 1884 (cat. no. 17) as 'Note in red – The Siesta'.
• 1884: Possibly Annual Exhibition of Sketches, Pictures & Photography: A Loan Collection of Pictures by Mr Whistler ..., Dublin Sketching Club, Dublin, 1884 (cat. no. 236).
• 1888: Possibly III. Internationale Kunst-Ausstellung, Königlicher Glaspalast, Munich, 1888 (cat. no. 58) as 'Eine rote Stimmung'.
• 1889: “Notes” – “Harmonies” – “Nocturnes”, H. Wunderlich & Co., New York, 1889 (cat. no. 26) as 'A Red Note – The Sofa'.
• 1904: Oil Paintings, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Mr. J. McNeill Whistler, Copley Society, Boston, 1904 (cat. no. 84) as 'La Note Rouge'.
• 1905: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the late James McNeill Whistler, First President of The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, New Gallery, Regent Street, London, 1905 (cat. no. 142, in deluxe edition) as 'La Note Rouge'.

Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), writing at the time of Whistler's one-man show in 1884, described it as a strong image, 'painted in a most masterful manner.' ¹³

The Sunday Times art critic had mixed feelings, being enthusiastic about the colour but disliking Whistler's depiction of figures:

'There is poetry really in some of them, as in the "Note in Red," or the "Scherzo in Blue," both of which are striking in colour, although they are marred with great ugliness of form. Mr. Whistler does but little justice to his sitters, or he must be singularly unfortunate in his models. Surely such long-legged children, such elephantine-footed females were never seen before. Their costumes seem to have been purchased, too, at that Rag shop in Chelsea, a picture of which, taken seemingly in the middle of the night, Mr. Whistler obligingly christens a "Nocturne in black and gold.” ' ¹⁴

The New York Times mentioned it in a generally favourable review in 1889. ¹⁵ It was priced at 100 guineas in 1889, but remained unsold, and was returned to Whistler after the exhibition by Wunderlich's on the SS Servia. ¹⁶

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. 254), plate 174, as 'Note in Red: The Siesta'.

Authored by Whistler

• None.

Catalogues 1855-1905

• 'Notes' - 'Harmonies' - 'Nocturnes', Messrs Dowdeswell, London, 1884 (cat. no. 17) as 'Note in red – The Siesta'.
• Possibly Annual Exhibition of Sketches, Pictures & Photography: A Loan Collection of Pictures by Mr Whistler ..., Dublin Sketching Club, Dublin, 1884 (cat. no. 236).
• Possibly III. Internationale Kunst-Ausstellung, Königlicher Glaspalast, Munich, 1888 (cat. no. 58) as 'Eine rote Stimmung'.
• “Notes” – “Harmonies” – “Nocturnes”, H. Wunderlich & Co., New York, 1889 (cat. no. 26) as 'A Red Note – The Sofa'.
• Oil Paintings, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Mr. J. McNeill Whistler, Copley Society, Boston, 1904 (cat. no. 84) as 'La Note Rouge'.
• Memorial Exhibition of the Works of the late James McNeill Whistler, First President of The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, New Gallery, Regent Street, London, 1905 (cat. no. 142) as 'La Note Rouge' in deluxe edition.

Newspapers 1855-1905

• Anon., ‘Notes – Harmonies – Nocturnes’, Sunday Times, London, 24 May 1884.
• Anon., 'The Private View at the Dublin Sketching Club', Dublin Daily Express, Dublin, 1 December 1884, p. 5.
• Anon., 'Etchings, Drawings, Pastels', New York Times, New York, 3 March 1889, p. 5.

Journals 1855-1905

• ‘An Enthusiast’, [Sickert, W. R.], 'Mr Whistler and His Art', Artist, vol. 5, 1 June 1884, p. 199-201.

Monographs

• None.

Books on Whistler

• Cary, Elizabeth Luther, The Works of James McNeill Whistler: A Study, with a Tentative List of Artist’s Works, New York, 1907 (cat. no. 475).
• Enaud-Lechien, Isabelle, Whistler et la France, Le Musée Miniature, Paris, France: Editions Herscher, 1994, p. 36, repr. p. 37.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., Susan Galassi, Aileen Ribeiro, and Patricia de Montfort, Whistler, Women and Fashion, New Haven and London, 2003, p. 152.
• Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols, London and Philadelphia, 1908, vol. 2, repr. p. 28.

Books, General

• None.

Catalogues 1906-Present

EXHIBITION:

• Principal Pictures from the Collection of Sir George Drummond, Barbizon House, London, 1919 (cat. no. 19), repr.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., Notes, Harmonies, and Nocturnes: Small Works by James McNeill Whistler, M. Knoedler and Co., Inc., New York, 1984, repr. no. 25, p. 33.
• Nochlin, Linda, Woman, Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, ILL, 1984, p. 8, repr. no. 17, cover.
• Selections from the Permanent Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, ILL, 1985.
• Atkinson, D. Scott et al., A Proud Heritage: Two Centuries of American Art, edited by Terry A. Neff, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Terra Foundation for the Arts, 1987, p. 144, repr.
• Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, July 1988.
• An American Revelation: The Daniel J. Terra Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 1988.
• Whistler and His Circle, Minnesota Museum of Art, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1989.
• Brooke, Janet M., Discerning Tastes: Montreal Collectors 1880–1920, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1989, pp. 166–67; pl. XVI, repr. p. 48 (cat. no. 61).
• Von Rolf Bothe, Herausgegeben, Curt Hermann 1854–1929: Ein Maler Der Moderne In Berlin, Berlin Museum, 1989, pp. 147, 150, 152, repr. p. 150.
• Gerdts, William H. et al., Impressions de toujours: les peintres américains en France, 1865–1915 (Lasting Impressions: American Painters in France, 1865–1915), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago, 1992, pp. 37–38, fig. 25.
• Regard sur James Abbott McNeill Whistler (James Abbott McNeill Whistler at a Glance), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, 1994.
• Dorment, Richard, and Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler, Tate Gallery, London, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1994-1995 (cat. no. 135), pp. 217–18, repr.
• American Treasures: Chase, Whistler and the Prendergasts, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 1995-1997.
• The Decorative Form: The Aesthetic Movement, Arts & Crafts and the Asian Influence in American Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 1999.
• On Process: Studio Themes, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 2001.
• Cartwright, Derrick R., L'Héroïque et le quotidian: les artistes américains, 1820–1920 (The Extraordinary and the Everyday: American Perspectives, 1820–1920), Musée d'Art Américain, Giverny, Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago, 2001, p. 24 (checklist); repr. cover.
• D'une colonie à une collection: le Musée d'Art Américain Giverny fête ses dix ans (From a Colony to a Collection: Celebrating the Tenth Anniversary of the Musée d'Art Américain Giverny), Musée d'Art Américain, Giverny, 2002.
• Bourguignon, Katherine M., and Elizabeth Kennedy. An American Point of View: The Daniel J. Terra Collection, (Un regard transatlantique. La collection d'art américain de Daniel J. Terra), Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago, 2002, pp. 106, 206; repr. pp. 9, 107, 206.
• A Place on the Avenue: Terra Museum of American Art Celebrates 15 Years in Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 2002-2003.
• Myers, Kenneth John, Mr. Whistler’s Gallery: Pictures at an 1884 Exhibition, Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2003, pp. 7, 18, 21, 87-88, repr. pp. 72-73.
• Modern Harmonies: Whistler Reflects on his Art, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 2003.
• Studied Abroad: Painted Impressions from the Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 2003- 2004.
• Collection Cameo, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, 2004.
• Expanded Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2005-2007.
• Le Temps des loisirs : peintures américaines (At Leisure: American Paintings), Musée d'Art Américain; Giverny, France, 2007.
• Lecomte, Vanessa, editor, Portrait of a Lady : peinture et photographies américains en France, 1870–1915 (Portrait of a Lady: American Paintings and Photographs in France, 1870–1915), Musée d'Art Américain; Giverny; and Musée des beaux-arts de Bordeaux; Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, 2008-2009, p. 95, repr. p. 44.
• Galleries of American Art with Loans from the Terra Foundation for American Art Collection, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2009-2013.
• Bourguignon, Katherine M., American Impressionism: A New Vision 1880-1900, (Une nouvelle lumière: les américains face à l’impressionnisme/ Impresionismo Americano), Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 2014-2015 (English, French and Spanish versions) repr. p. 114.
• Pathways to Modernism: American Art, 1865-1945, Shanghai Museum, Shanghai, 2018-2019, pp. 54-55 (repr.).

SALES:

• Drummond sale, Christie's, London, 27 June 1919 (lot 166) 'La Note Rouge'.

Journals 1906-Present

• 'Tips from the Pros: Whistler's Veils of Paint', American Artist , vol. 48, April 1984, repr. p. 102.
• Sokol, David M., 'The Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois', The Magazine Antiques, vol. 126, no. 5, November 1984, pp. 1156-69, repr. pl. 23, p. 1165.
• Southgate, M. Therese, 'The Cover', The Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 272, no. 1, 6 July 1994, p. 3, repr. cover.
• Southgate, M. Therese, 'The Cover', The Journal of the American Medical Association France, vol. 6, no. 56, October 1994, p. 6, repr. cover.
• Covington, Richard, 'Whistler in Retrospect', Art & Antiques, vol. 18, May 1995, pp. 90-96, repr. p. 92.
• Dorment, Richard, 'James McNeill Whistler, 1834-1903', American Art Review, vol. 7, no. 3, June-July 1995, pp. 148-58, repr. p. 150.
• Kennedy, Elizabeth, 'The Terra Museum of American Art,' American Art Review, December 2002, pp. 126-41, at p. 138, repr. p. 136.

Websites

• Terra Foundation of American Art website at http://collection.terraamericanart.org.

Unpublished

• Revillon, Joseph Whistler, Draft Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of J. McN. Whistler, [ca 1945-1955], Glasgow University Library (cat. no. 176).

Other

• Note in Red: The Siesta, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum for American Art, Chicago, July 1988, repr.