Come and Explore the BIGGEST UK Whistler Exhibition in 30 YEARS at Tate Britain in London!

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:02]A very warm welcome to Art Gallery Explorer, the vlog which explores and celebrates the London art scene coming up.

[00:00:20]very excited to be about to be heading into the new show here at Tape Britain, which you can hopefully just about see behind me, exploring the work of James McNeel Whistler. This exhibition is the first big show of his work in London for 30 years. I'm going to give a bit of an introduction as we go into the show cuz I plan to semi-narrate this vlog, but as always, I'll bring you as much work as I possibly can do. The show's on until the 27th of September, 2026, and it's £24 to get in. So come and join me as we head inside Tape Britain and explore this big mega show focusing on the work of James McNeel Whistler.

[00:00:58]This show is vast and contains hundreds of works. So I will bring you the absolute highlights and the first work we see is a gem. It's from the art institute of Chicago entitled the artist in his studio. And we see a clear conversation with Spanish great Velasquez. conversation which happened throughout Whistler's career. In the studio is the first main section and it takes us back to the studio house you can see here that Whistler had purpose built in the 1870s but which he only lived in very briefly because he lost it due to bankruptcy.

[00:01:32]But we have to remember that he lived in Chelsea before this as well. Staying at Cheney Walk where he painted the famous picture of his mother. River played a seinal part in his art, especially in his famous Nocturn series we'll see later. What I loved about this section was that it it made the point that Whistler rejected the fussy um Victorian decor and decoration um in favor of East Asian decoration. You saw the Kongshi um style uh ceramics of which Whistler owned over 300. And this screen um is clearly influenced by Japanese art.

[00:02:13]Indeed, Whistler was one of the promoters of Hiroshi's work and he owned copies of these two prints which come from the British Museum.

[00:02:22]Interior design and interior decor very important to Whistler and clearly they were to his wife Beatric who um whose work one of whose work you can see here.

[00:02:32]We get to see Whistler's pallet and the fact that he preferred log handle brushes so he could step away from the canvas and the sitter and observe the impact of his work.

[00:02:45]And finally at the end of the room we're introduced to two major oil works. Um the first shows Maud Franklin his lover as the heroine of Walter Scots novel the heart of Midlotheian. And even more thrilling is to see Mud Franklin in an enragement in black and brown. And we see Franklin dressed in fashionable clothing. But this is part of his lifelong conversation with Velasquez.

[00:03:12]And he made a series of arrangements in black. Having been introduced to Whistler and his studio, as you saw there, we go back to the start of Whistler's career in a room entitled Origin Story, which is a really big room actually, which covers the early part of his life cuz Whistler was born in 1834 in Laour, Massachusetts. Grew up as a New Englander, but his father worked on the railways and he was invited by the Zar of Russia to live in St. Petersburg.

[00:03:40]So the family moved there and it's quite clear that he was spent a lot of time um drawing as a child and indeed he studied art in St. Petersburg and we see a lot of these kind of early works many of which are held in American collections in this first bit of the show.

[00:04:00]Many of the works in this room are interesting because they show us Whistler developing as an artist and it's quite clear to see that he was um influenced by other other uh more well-known western artists and often was copying and mimicking their styles.

[00:04:19]Tragically, um Whistler's father died of cholera at the young age of 49. And so the family moved back to uh the United States and settled in Connecticut. And Whistler um became a student at the very prestigious West Point Military Academy where um many of his family had had been in the military before him. And we see some fascinating works like this one produced while he was a student there.

[00:04:48]He clearly um was torn between the romantic idea of being a soldier and his his clear passion and skill of being an artist. And apparently he was um forced out of the West Point Military Academy because of poor grades.

[00:05:06]In 1854, Whistler briefly joined the drawing division of the US coast and geodactic survey and he used his artistic skill to map coastlines to support US commerce and industry. Um, as we can see from a couple of works you mainly there for their historical interest.

[00:05:26]At the age of 21, Whistler um inherited a modest legacy and in 1855 he left the United States for Europe and specifically Paris and he lived in Europe really for the rest of his life.

[00:05:42]In Paris he studied at the Louv Museum where he copied old masters. But what's really striking about this section of the exhibition are the etchings of everyday life of real life and often of some of the darker um parts of of Parisian life.

[00:06:03]Gustav Kubar was the leading painter of French realism when when um Wister arrived in Paris.

[00:06:14]There's a real tension between the message of the exhibition, which is that Whistler was in many ways about art for art's sake and a producing beauty, and the fact that he was so attracted throughout his career to a certain extent to portraying scenes which were not seen as stereotypically beautiful.

[00:06:35]It was quite clear that Whistler was inspired by Charles Bodilair who defined the artist as someone who could capture the timeless beauty in a restless modern city with extremes of poverty and wealth and he certainly does that. lived on the left bank um staying in rundown rented rooms according to the exhibition and and hanging out in cafes and bars where debates about romanticism and realism raged and he portrayed in in in these these works the rag trade um p etchings um you some of the people working in the lowest paid jobs in Europe And the exhibition says that he bought his love of 17th century painters, many of whom he'd studied at the Louvre, um especially Rembrandt, into his investigations of of everyday life and he was beginning to become quite successful as as a producer of these etchings. But obviously what he really wanted to be was well known as a painter. And we begin to see that both in the next section of this room and also in the rest of the exhibition. Although he never moved fully away from etching and indeed he returned to it throughout his career.

[00:08:07]While his early years in Paris were dominated by etching, Whistler was also producing oils like this one. And indeed, recent research, according to the exhibition, has said that this was probably one of Whistler's first oil paintings produced in Paris.

[00:08:22]Whistler would often paint small oils, and these are are small on the wall of um friends and neighbors. And the exhibition explains that he was still moving from being a drawer to a painter.

[00:08:36]in some of these early works. He he is still following the graphite line that's been drawn um on on on the paper.

[00:08:46]But the exhibition explains he gradually gains confidence with expressive brush strokes. The last work that we see in the room is this one. Um a self-portrait, one of a number that that populate the exhibition and flow like a thread through it. And um this self-portrait is an example of how Whistler carefully cured his image. And in smoking a um cigarette as opposed to a pipe, he's laying his claim to modernity and to being a newly modern style of painter.

[00:09:22]The room across the water, which is the third room in the exhibition, explores um Whistler's move to London, um which happened in 1859.

[00:09:32]It also makes the point that um Whistler was part of a generation of painters who moved away from the realism of Gustaf Kubar and broke u new ground by trying to capture the fleeting beauty and movement and light um sketching quickly and painting with visible varied brush strokes. The the paintings that we see here well clearly not impressionists.

[00:10:00]the exhibition argues are the beginnings of the movement towards impressionism.

[00:10:06]Um Whistler's move to London in 1859 saw him capturing various London scenes and one of those uh series of scenes became known as the temp set published in 1860 and you can see a few examples of this um in these etchings that that you're just seeing now. Whistler was drawn to the modernity and changing nature of the city of London. Utter Greavves was a temp's boatman whose family owned that boatyard you can see in the front of the picture. And he was also a Chelsea neighbor of um Whistler and a self-taught painter. And he became one of Whistler's first pupils.

[00:10:50]And Whistler was always drawn to the river. As I said in the first room, Whistler lived um for a lot of his successful period in Chelsea, a riverside place where he was able to capture the change and fluidity of the river. But he also um spent time uh downstream in the docklands like this painting of whopping which captures the river in its kind of beauty and uh griiness as well. Um, the exhibition makes a point that many contemporary art lovers of Whistler saw his paintings as unfinished, incomplete, and they use this work as an example of that accusation from the time.

[00:11:36]The show breaks into life in room 4 where we're suddenly thrown into Pete Whistler. We see portraits such as this where Whistler paints a businessman he met in Paris who became a close friend and captures his likeness with bold brush strokes.

[00:11:54]Whistler moved to London partly after this work was rejected at the Paris salon but accepted by the Royal Academy.

[00:12:03]The figure is his half sister Deborah Helen who's playing the piano that belonged to their father before he died.

[00:12:10]We also see Whistler's most famous work, one of the world's most famous modern artworks, arrangement in gray and black number one. The first time this has been seen in Britain for two decades. The work shows Anna Whistler's mother and it's called arrangement in gray and black, but the palenness of her face and lace are rendered with light brush strokes contrasting with the morning black. Look at the curtains as well, gray with silver dots and dashes.

[00:12:42]Whistler's portraits notoriously took many sittings, and sitters were often left enraged by what became acts of endurance.

[00:12:53]This poor 8-year-old, for example, sat 70 times and exhausted, often finished the day in tears.

[00:13:04]Whistler painted this picture of his brother who had served on the Confederate side in the American Civil War and fled to London after the defeat of the Confederacy.

[00:13:18]And the exhibition doesn't really engage with Whistler's own relationship with the South in the United States, but hints it was a source of discomfort for some of his friends.

[00:13:29]Butterfly World highlights Whistler's debt to his study of East Asian art.

[00:13:34]Whistler made full use of the expansion that trade and empire bought to collect items that flooded into London and Paris from China and Japan.

[00:13:45]The exhibition makes the point that he learned from the lines and the flat colors and the balanced composition of Japanese prints and as we've learned already owned many works himself.

[00:14:03]This famous work symphony in white number two the little white girl portrays Whistler's lover Joanna Hifman.

[00:14:10]Her fan is d decorated by a harsh gay print.

[00:14:14]Ifman was an artist model who became Wisters's lover and even helped raise his son who was a result of an affair with another lover.

[00:14:27]Famously when when Whistler's mother arrived in London, Hiverman had to be speedily exited from the building and Whistler's mother took over as mistress of the house.

[00:14:40]We see in this room Whistler beginning to adopt musical names for his paintings, arrangements, symphonies.

[00:14:48]He said that this was because his work was art for art's sake and he called them by musical names to emp emphasize their tonal qualities and to free them from narrative context.

[00:15:01]For him, the paintings were about abstract concepts of tone and color. He didn't want people to read much more than that. His most famous quote, art for art's sake. We see that in this painting, variations in violet and green. He was insistent that his paintings were purely or primarily aesthetic experiences to be enjoyed by the viewer for the balance of colors and the visual impact of these works.

[00:15:34]We're then bought into a spectacular recreation of the Peacock Room. Whistler was friends with Frederick Leland, a leading patron of modern art and wealthy shipping magnate. He wanted to renovate his dining room to display Whistler's works along with his collection of blue and white ceramics. The original architect fell ill, so he asked Whis Whistler to apply finishing touches.

[00:15:59]Instead, Whistler radically transformed the room without Leland's permission, filling it with peacock motifs.

[00:16:06]In this room, a loud audio recreation of the furious row between Leighton, who refused to play and Whistler, periodically plays out and is worth listening to. The actual Peacot room is one of Whistler's um only intact interiors and can be viewed at the Frier Gallery in Washington, DC.

[00:16:26]Whistler took a trip to Chile in 1866 and was inspired by the sea at dusk. It reminded him of the flatness of Japanese prints. On his return to London, he began his most famous and in my opinion satisfying series of works, his nocturns.

[00:16:46]He transformed the fog and smoke pollution into a twilight of timeless beauty.

[00:16:54]He, as the exhibition explains, moved away from impressionistic brush strokes. Instead, using ribbon-like strokes to evoke the moving river.

[00:17:08]He soaked the canvas in thin paint to capture the mist and delicate touches created gleams of light reflected in the water.

[00:17:21]And I think it's important to say that this is one of the mightiest collections of of his nocturns that have ever been assembled in one room. And so it really allows you to get a sense of of the atmosphere of these ethil works which are you know absolutely not abstract works in the main but are moving beyond impressionism and and helping Whistler stake a claim as as as one of um the late 19th century's great experimental.

[00:17:55]This work by the way is an incredibly rare loan to Europe from the White House. Usually the White House may lend some of its collection to the Smithsonian or a gallery in Washington, but this has come across the the um Atlantic and I'd certainly never seen it before. He pursued the nocturn style throughout the rest of his career actually and as we'll see in in sort of rooms towards the end of the exhibition, which is coming up, there are still works referred to as nocturns later than the most um famous paintings were produced.

[00:18:32]Whistler's pictures of fireworks pushed his style to a close to an abstract limit. In fact, it was the work um not turning black and gold the falling rocket which led um John Ruskin, a very influential Victorian art critic, to accuse him of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face, especially for asking 200 guineies for such a painting. Whistler sued for liable and in one of the most infamous artistic court cases of the 19th century won but was awarded the poultry sum of a farthing. The heavy costs were to be split effectively bankrupting both men.

[00:19:15]Whistler lost everything including his purpose-built studio house in Chelsea.

[00:19:22]His bankruptcy meant that he left London for Venice, living on a commission to make 12 etchings of the city.

[00:19:30]And despite his loss of reputation, the exhibition explains, he stuck to his artistic beliefs. He stayed for 18 months and produced works, including the Venice set that you've just seen.

[00:19:43]He was nomadic, often for the rest of his life, roaming Britain and Europe, working on small landscapes.

[00:19:51]And as we've seen in those early etchings of of Parisian life, he not he looked for subjects that weren't traditionally picturesque um but but but of ordinary people and places and even his paintings of Venice are often of of of lesser scene spots that maybe tourists wouldn't find um out about. The exhibition explains how Whistler chose his medium in response to each location that he was working in.

[00:20:21]And then hence why this section of the exhibition has a really diverse range of mediums including chalk and pastel, watercolor, etchings and works in oil as well.

[00:20:33]And he worked with speed to explore the effects of of these different these different mediums. And he controlled as well how his smaller works were displayed.

[00:20:45]Um he created his solo shows in rooms decorated in a minimal Japanese style.

[00:20:50]These spaces can be seen as forerunners to the white wall galleries of our time according to the exhibition.

[00:20:57]And the Venice series which you've just seen um has been displayed at Tate in the way that um Whistler himself specified.

[00:21:08]He spent quite a lot of time um sketching in the Netherlands as well.

[00:21:13]And again we see the familiar theme of um of of of looking for for spots which are not necessarily the most famous views but which piqu his interest as an artist. And we also see that as I said earlier, as well as obsessively painting the sea, something which was a mainstay throughout much of his career, he also returned to themes um such as his experiments in color and tone.

[00:21:43]His um focus on using color in the titles of works like these remind us of his maxim of art for art's sake.

[00:21:58]we see him return to the nocturn motif um in this Amsterdam painting and he was still drawn despite um everything that had happened to him um by painting images of the tempames and um and and he captured London. I still think he's one of the the great 19th century capturers of London as it's changing um and the bridges are changing and the buildings are becoming more industrial.

[00:22:28]Whistler had been friends with Beatrice Godwin for years and yet they married in 1888 after Godwin's husband had died and shared a nomadic lifestyle but also um Beatrice Godwin set up a home in Paris designing its interior and garden which you can see here.

[00:22:48]Whistler and Beatrice Godwin were only married for eight happy years and only 2 years after moving to Paris. Godwin died at the age of 38, two years after a cancer diagnosis.

[00:23:04]The incredibly in intimate prints that you're seeing now from the Art Institute of Chicago shows their last days together in a room overlooking the temps at the Seavoy in London where they base themselves to get medical treatment.

[00:23:20]And I have to say that these intimate works I wasn't aware of. They really surprise me and um I found them incredibly powerful and incredibly moving.

[00:23:32]When Whistler returned from Venice, he was ready to relaunch his public reputation and defend art for art's sake. He hired a theater to deliver a provocative lecture, Mr. Whistler's 10:00, to the paying public. This is recreated um in broom 8 and he jousted verbally with public figures such as Oscar Wild in the last 20 years of his life before dying in 1903.

[00:23:58]Whistler returned to painting portraits of of members of society.

[00:24:04]And for him, as you can see from the colors and the tones, these were aesthetic experiments as much as captures of likeness.

[00:24:13]He spent a long time, years sometimes, reworking some paintings even after they've been signed, sold, and exhibited.

[00:24:22]Yet, he had pursued an effect, which you can hopefully see in some of these, which the exhibition believes looks effortless.

[00:24:30]And Whistler believed, according to the exhibition, that beauty was intensified by the brevity. He gave titles arrangements in black to a series of fulllength figures emerging from the shadows. And these these portraits generally are technically very very good indeed.

[00:24:49]In 1898, Whistler along with Carmen Rossy who you can see here set up the Academy Carmen an art school in Paris that it's fair to say was not a massive success.

[00:25:05]Many of the students were American women. Some came from from from Britain as well. And um Gwen John was actually one of the famous artists who briefly studied at the academy car sometimes known as the Whistler school.

[00:25:21]Whistler was often um absent from lessons and there was much disgruntlement from students at the level of training that many of them that many of them received. And indeed the Academy Command shut in 1901 with Whistler and increasingly poor health.

[00:25:40]Um he as I say died in 1903.

[00:25:45]Wow. Well, I hope you enjoyed that walk through the epic James McNeel Whistler show from Tape Britain. Thoroughly enjoyed that show and hopefully that gave you a sense of it. I always encourage you to go and visit the exhibitions to see the works with your own eyes. And that's particularly true in this case because lots of the works, as you saw, were quite dark and so they need to be experienced firsthand. But if you're not able to go, hopefully this gave you a sense that you'd at least paid a virtual visit to the exhibition.

[00:26:13]It's interesting because this show was was formed at its core around three important collections of Whistler's work. One from Joan Winshield's collection. she's based at or was based in Las Vegas. one from um the Colby uh Museum of Art attached to Colby College in Maine where they were very lucky to receive the Lundquest which included over 360 works by Whistler and then probably most importantly from the Hunarian in the the University of Glasgow where Whistler's sister-in-law um and heir gave this institution in Glasgow one of the finest collections of Whistler works and paraphernalia including you saw the paint boxes, etc. And so these formed the core, but then they were supplemented magnificently by really big important works from international quality museums like the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the the Musea Dorsce, etc. And obviously we were able to see what's commonly known as Whistler's Mother, one of the seinal works of modern art in in in this exhibition. And I always think about these shows in terms of the good, the bad, and the beautiful. And there was way more good for me cuz I really enjoyed it. First of all, I love being reminded of what a radical artist Whistler was and how in these nocturns especially, he pushed the boundaries of of expression at the time he was painting. I thought that was done really well and I thought that came across really well. more broadly. Um, this was the first Whistler show I'd been to of this anywhere near this scale. And so I found it really satisfying to get an understanding of his whole life and career. Um, stretching from from his very early days of drawing in the United States through to his his death in London in 1903.

[00:28:02]I got a real sense of him as an artist and how his art developed and I really enjoyed that. I also thought the scene setting was some of the best that I've experienced in a show. I thought that was done really well. I love the fact that we went into his studio kind of we saw him at his peak first of all before rewinding. I love the use of of loans from places like the British Museum and the VNA of Japanese and and Chinese artifacts and works of art to explain what was making Whistler tick at this time. And I really enjoyed the recreation of the Peacock Room. It made me want to go and visit the original at the Fria Gallery in Washington even more having been in there. And I like touches like the audio of the argument with Whistler. It kind of brought the art alive and I thought that was really fantastic. My highlight was definitely the room of noturns. I think this is probably the most um number that have been brought together in one go. And seeing them all in one big room really worked. It got you to see that this was an obsession in a way of of Whistler.

[00:29:02]And I thoroughly enjoyed that. And finally, I really like the tension between Whistler's pursuit, a relentless pursuit of beauty of art for art's sake and the fact that he often tried to find this in unusual places in the modern world. That was thrilling to see and be reminded of because it was consistent, I think, throughout his whole career. So, I really enjoyed that as well.

[00:29:26]Obviously, it was great to see um arrangement in gray and black number one, Whistler's mother. That was such a good coup to have that border cross from the Musea Dorsce despite the riches of the Musea Dorsce. Um that that that is still one of its most well-known paintings and it's a real draw. So, the fact that they were prepared to lend that to this show may was the icing on the cake for me and it was great to see such a such a well-known work again in in person.

[00:29:57]In terms of the bad, um, there wasn't much that I didn't enjoy about this exhibition at all. It was it was dictated because it was broadly chronological after the first run by by Whistler's career which ebbed and flowed. And it was quite clear that after his disastrous lawsuit against John Ruskin, he was forced back from his experimental peak in lots of ways.

[00:30:20]Although you did still see him pushing the boundaries in the works that he was having to do really to earn money. Uh there were some revelations in his Venice set and his his Dutch works as well. There was some really beautiful works there. But I thought the exhibition lost a little bit of energy and drive. And I would say that in the first big room after the in the studio section as well, the works of art in this room are not all great by any means. you can see that he's clearly copying other artists, but they were very interesting from a from a understanding his development as an artist point of view. So, it was kind of like the core where the great art was um the core middle rooms if you like um where the majority of the great art was.

[00:31:03]I thought it was interesting because the tape had been praised in this show for for letting the art speak for itself.

[00:31:10]Whistler was a controversial, violent and and sometimes according to accounts from a boat he got back from Chile, racist man. And the the take kind of unusually for it stepped back from that.

[00:31:24]But I would love to have got a little bit more of a sense of this from the exhibition at at certain points. I'm very glad that it did let the art speak for itself. But a little bit more of that context to go with the scene setting and story um telling of of of the background to his art would have been in my opinion good, but you might totally disagree with that and I know a lot of people do. And finally um there were a few key works missing and these were in a couple of cases blown up big on the walls. Um and this just wetted my appetite to actually want to see the real thing. So, I'm not sure if that necessarily added to the exhibition, but overall, I really enjoyed this show. And in terms of the beautiful, I'm going to go for one of the nocturns. I'm going to go for this one actually, which has been on lots of the publicity material cuz I really thought it was a it summed up what the temp's nocturns were about, the London nocturns were about. It's a beautiful piece of work, and I'd love to have that in a very specific place on my wall. Overall, I 100% enjoyed it. I'm giving this show an 8.5 out of 10. I think it's a once in a generation show.

[00:32:28]Um is the first one in Britain of this scale for 30 years and I really recommend that you go along and um and visit it. Uh it is on until >> 27th of September 2026 before it transfers to the Van Go Museum in Amsterdam. So if you're Dutch or maybe living in Western Germany or Belgium, you may well want to visit that show in in Amsterdam. It's going to be terrific to see that from October onwards. And I think, and somebody might want to confirm this in the comments, I couldn't actually find it in my research. I think it's then going on to the United States, possibly to Washington. Thank you ever so much for watching. Um, please do check out my Gwen John vlog. She was obviously briefly tutored by Whistler at his ill- fated art school, as I mentioned. And, um, in some ways um, you can see Whistler's influence in in in some of her work. So, do check out that epic exhibition from the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Thank you for watching. This vlog has taken a long time to put together, so that's why there's been a bit of a delay, but do stay tuned, hit that notification bell, and subscribe for many more vlogs from the London art scene over the next few weeks and months.