Violett und Silber – Die Tiefsee

In 1891 the French state bought Whistler's portrait of his mother for the Luxembourg museum, which for an American painter working in Paris was as good as an official blessing, and he settled in the city. The summer of 1893 he spent on the coast of Brittany. For years he had been making his seascapes tiny, on panels he could carry in a pocket, and here he went back to a full-size canvas. The Chicago collector Arthur Jerome Eddy recorded how it was done, with Whistler painting from a boat while a crewman held it steady against the swell. He showed it at the Champ-de-Mars salon in 1894, and in October that year another Chicagoan, John A. Lynch, bought it out of his Paris studio. The horizon sits high and the viewpoint is low, about the height of a man sitting in a boat.