The restless eye of James McNeill Whistler

Restless and elusive, James McNeill Whistler was a man who rarely stood still. Born in Massachusetts, he spent time in St Petersburg as a child, when his father, an engineer, was commissioned to build a railroad in Russia. Later, unsuited to military training, he emigrated to Paris. London would become his long-term home from the age of 25, but he retained an itinerant streak, periodically disappearing off to Amsterdam or Algiers. A man of many mistresses, he showed little interest in conventional domesticity until marrying on a whim relatively late in life, only for his wife to die soon after.

The same refusal to settle is evident in his aesthetic style. Whistler began his career by producing etchings of astonishing detail, drawing upon skills acquired mapping coastlines for the US Coast Survey. In oils, however, he jettisoned his former precision, cultivating a style that was, at times, hazy to the point of near-abstraction, such as in the evocative Chelsea in Ice (1864), composed of little more than grey ribbon-like streaks. He was magpie-like, taking inspiration from Courbet here, nodding to Rembrandt there, flirting with fashionable Japonisme, and forever putting on different hats, metaphorically and literally.

Tate Britain’s mega-exhibition brings together a colossal number of Whistler’s works, many from private collections. At its centre are the highlights any fan could wish to see, including the celebrated, much-parodied portrait of his mother, sympathetically surrounded by other portraits in similarly moody hues. Arguably, the most captivating of these is the charmingly delicate Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander (1872-4). One winces, however, at learning that the eight-year-old model was forced to pose, her feet placed balletically in fourth position, some 70 times, and that she was frequently reduced to tears. The resentment that Whistler captures in her eyes and pout is palpable.

Perhaps we come closest to the quintessential Whistler in his more impressionistic paintings, the ones that are mere wisps of an idea, all flat colours, blurred faces and loose drapery, as ancient Greece meets Japan. Harmony in Flesh Colour and Red (1869) is a hazy evocation of three women in flowing red gowns against a wall adorned with fans and lanterns. Variations in Violet and Green (1871), with its interesting vertical format and women with parasols and kimono-like dresses placed low in the composition, appears at first sight to be a Japanese woodblock print: a sort of Tokyo-on-Thames.

The Tate exhibition brings together many of Whistler’s atmospheric ‘Nocturnes’, painted barely a mile away on the riverbank at Chelsea. As displayed here, they move from lightest to darkest, the palest of them gleaming almost iridescently against a smoke-hued wall, sky merging into water into shore. Whistler’s intention that paint should give an appearance of ‘breath on the surface of a pane of glass’ was achieved by a process of smearing and smudging, rubbing away and reapplying.

Whistler’s smaller works in pencil prove rather more challenging to present effectively. In places, curator Carol Jacobi has merely lined up one tiny sketch after another, apparently following Whistler’s own instructions. The attentiveness to authenticity is impressive, but in such cavernous rooms, the etchings seem dwarfed: a few display cabinets to create variety would not have gone amiss. The high quality of the draughtsmanship itself, from the earliest teenage doodles, is, however, unquestionable, whether in character sketches barely two inches square on what look like backs of envelopes or in more formal etchings of factories, dock scenes and ships. Whistler’s fellow military cadets, immortalised in watercolour miniatures, spring to life with energy and good humour.

Representations of the lives of left-bank Bohemians are also particularly vivid. Whistler, the archetypal American in Paris, threw himself performatively into the Bohemian lifestyle, carousing in bars, waxing lyrical about art and ideas and taking up with a milliner girlfriend named ‘Fumette’. Inspired by Henri Murger’s recent novel Scènes de la vie de Bohème, he produced graphite sketches of artists’ garrets, including his own. A self-portrait shows the young Whistler in a raffish hat, exhaling cigarette smoke from the side of his mouth, no doubt imagining himself as Murger’s painter ‘Marcel’ (later immortalised by Puccini as Marcello in La Bohème).

Whistler was dogmatic about his commitment to art for art’s sake. Thus, it is fitting that this exhibition has – unusually for the Tate – little to say about politics and, instead, pays close attention to matters of artistic technique. The show also has an immersive element. It opens with a recreation of Whistler’s London studio, complete with his Chinese porcelain and Hiroshige prints, his palette, easel and brushes, and concludes with a film of an actor animatedly impersonating him as he gives a provocative lecture.

At the heart of the exhibition is a recreation of the ‘Peacock Room’ (the original is on display at the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington DC), which Whistler was commissioned to design to complement the ceramics collection of the shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland. Asked merely to put the finishing touches to Leyland’s Kensington dining room, Whistler remodelled the entire space, prompting an almighty row – brought to life here sonically – although the room itself is, to modern eyes, exquisite.

Perhaps Leyland should have anticipated trouble. Whistler was a combative character, forever getting into spats and squaring up to anyone who dared criticise him, though he saw the funny side of things when an actor impersonated his look in Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s satire on the aesthetic movement. Whistler served the critic John Ruskin with a writ for libel, after the latter wrote a review accusing him of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. His pride cost him dearly, with the expense of the case bankrupting him and forcing him out of his home and studio.

Whistler simply took to the road, sketchbook once more in hand, this time to Venice, where the cost of living in the late 1870s was evidently cheap. And then he was back, producing enormous portraits in shades of black and the manner of Velázquez. Just as you think you have grasped who Whistler was, he shape-shifts again, flutters away, his butterfly monogram well-chosen indeed.

Whistler Retrospective is at Tate Britain until 27 September 2026.