Sketch for Rose and Silver: La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine

In the early 1860s London had caught a fashion for things newly arriving from Japan, which had only lately reopened to Western trade, fans and blue-and-white porcelain and cheap woodblock prints. Whistler was among the first painters in the city to build pictures out of that enthusiasm. This small panel is his working trial for a much larger canvas, a standing woman in a loose kimono holding a fan, her pose drawn partly from Japanese prints by Utamaro. The model was Christine Spartali, a young woman known in artistic London for her looks. The finished full-size version, called Rose and Silver: La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine, later hung in the dining room Whistler decorated for the shipowner Frederick Leyland, the gilded and painted space now known as the Peacock Room. This is where that room began, on a board barely two feet tall.