Life of James McNeill Whistler, . ots and trays and flowers around her are in a profusionnever seen in the houses of Tokio or Canton. In The Gold Screen poseand arrangement are equally inappropriate. The Princesse, in hertrailing robes, is as little Japanese. When he left the studio and tookhis canvas to the front of the house and painted The Balcony, thoughhe clothed the English models in Eastern dress and gave them Easterninstruments to play upon, and placed them before Japanese screensand Anglo-Japanese railings, their background was the Thames withthe chimneys of Battersea. We have heard o
Life of James McNeill Whistler, . ots and trays and flowers around her are in a profusionnever seen in the houses of Tokio or Canton. In The Gold Screen poseand arrangement are equally inappropriate. The Princesse, in hertrailing robes, is as little Japanese. When he left the studio and tookhis canvas to the front of the house and painted The Balcony, thoughhe clothed the English models in Eastern dress and gave them Easterninstruments to play upon, and placed them before Japanese screensand Anglo-Japanese railings, their background was the Thames withthe chimneys of Battersea. We have heard of a Chinese bamboorack he used for these railings, though some remember it as astudio property made from his design. Nothing save the beauty ofthe detail mattered to Whistler. It was not the real Japan he wantedto paint, but his idea of it, just as Rembrandt painted his idea of theHoly Land. The titles he afterwards found for these pictures are Purple andRose, Caprice in Purple and Gold, Harmony in Flesh Colour and Green,86 [1863. THE COAST OF BRITTANYALONE WITH THE TIDE OIL In the possession of Ross Winans, Esq. (See ^age 66) Chelsea Days Rose and Silver. Harmony was what he sought, though no Dutchmansurpassed their delicacy of detail, truth of texture, intricacy of yet we are conscious in them of artificial structure as in none ofhis other work ; the models do not live in their Japanese draperies;Eastern detail is out of place on the banks of the Thames ; the deviceis too obvious. The Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine is the portrait of MissChristine Spartali, daughter of the Greek Consul-General in London,whom Whistler met at Ionides, and to whose dinners and partieshe often went. There were two daughters, Christine (CountessEdmond de Cahen) and Marie (Mrs. W. J. Stillman), both beauti-ful. Whistler and Rossetti were struck by their beauty, andWhistler asked the younger sister, Christine, to sit to him. , who always accompanied her, has told us the s
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