How East Asia Taught Whistler to See
Harmony in Flesh Colour and Red, c.1869 The first thing you encounter at Tate Britain's James McNeill Whistler retrospective — before the nocturnes, before the portraits, before almost anything — is porcelain. Shelves of blue-and-white Kangxi ware from the artist's own collection line the studio room that opens the exhibition, accompanied by Japanese woodblock prints by Torii Kiyonaga and other ukiyo-e masters. One painting greets you before them. Then this. Tate begins not with Whistler's most celebrated works but with the objects he collected, studied and lived alongside — shifting attention away from the familiar mythology of the celebrity, the provocateur, the defendant in the Ruskin trial, and towards a more fundamental question. How did Whistler arrive at an idea of beauty that would make him one of the most distinctive artists of the nineteenth century? The opening galleries suggest that East Asian art played a decisive role. Whistler's collection of Chinese po...
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