Harmonie in Grün und Rosa: Das Musikzimmer

Whistler had moved from Paris to London in 1859 and was spending much of his time at his half-sister Deborah's house on Sloane Street, where her husband Francis Seymour Haden, a surgeon who etched seriously on the side, gathered other printmakers. He painted this room across 1860 and 1861 and called it The Morning Call. The girl is his niece Annie Haden. The woman in black is Isabella Boott, related to the Hadens by marriage. Deborah herself appears only in the mirror. The picture was meant for the Royal Academy exhibition of May 1861. Then Frederic Leighton, a painter whose eye Whistler respected, told him Annie's head was out of keeping with the rest, and he spent the summer reworking it and missed the show. The musical title came more than ten years later, when he started renaming his pictures as harmonies, symphonies and nocturnes.