Little Rose of Lyme Regis

Nobody commissioned this portrait. Rosie was the daughter of the mayor of Lyme Regis, and Whistler, spending the autumn of 1895 in the little Dorset town, painted her as one of a few studies of local children he called the little Lyme Regis maidens. She sits facing us with her hands clasped in her lap, a red pinafore over a dark dress, her brown hair falling forward over one ear. The paint goes on in thin layers, so that she seems to come forward out of the dark background.

Whistler had a long history of scraping pictures down and starting again, and of leaving them unfinished. His biographers Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell recorded him saying that with this portrait, and with the one of the town blacksmith painted the same autumn, he had finally solved the problem of carrying a picture through to the end. He made few changes here, only shifting the outline of the hair.

The following summer he promised the New York dealer Edward Kennedy that he would add a few finishing touches without spoiling it. There is no sign that he ever did. Kennedy sold the girl and the blacksmith together to the museum in Boston, and Whistler learned of the sale only afterwards and gently scolded him for not telling him.