Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

Although this is a description of Whistler's late work, the artist acknowledges
that he learned his approach from Gleyre and therefore would have employed
similar methods throughout his career, with either a wider range of pigments
or less mixing of pigments in his earlier work. Menpes confirms the attention
to the palette but attributes to him the use of more intense lemon and cadmium
yellows placed next to the ochre, and the use of rose madder instead
of the Venetian red (7).
Whistler kept a great number of brushes, many of which he used at a single
sitting in order to prevent his dominant hues from becoming fu rther mixed.
He spent much time cleaning and preparing these brushes, sometimes trimming
and changing their shape. He had various types, including decorator's
brushes to lay in grounds and backgrounds and extremely long-handled
brushes for his portrait technique.
Pigments analyzed
Figure 4. James Whistler, Harmony in
Grey and Green: Miss Cicely Alexander,
1872- 1874. Oil on canvas. The Tate Gallery,
London.
Analysis of pigments fo und on Whistler's paintings confirm the use of complex
mixtures of pigments usually involving at least some ivory black.
Frequently, the same pigments are found mixed in different proportions
throughout a painting. In nocturnes, mixtures of lead white, ivory black, cobalt,
Prussian blue, and ultramarine have been found. By these means, Whistler
produced his harmonies. For instance, Harmony in Grey and Green: Miss Cicely
Alexander (1872) has a gray background, but this is an optical mixture of
several colors based on lead white and ivory black (Fig. 4) . The same colors
occur in the superficially white dress. By restricting the saturation and hue
of his colors throughout the scheme, Whistler could model his fo rms without
introducing discordant hues typical of the works of many nineteenth-century
painters influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and exploiting a range of unmixed
pigments. This restriction allowed him to explore subtle color effects; fo r
example, he could choose to highlight a red as in the Arrangement in Flesh
Color and Black: Portrait