The Artist in His Studio

In August 1865 Whistler wrote to the French painter Henri Fantin-Latour about the picture he meant to send to the Paris Salon the next spring. Fantin had put Whistler into two group portraits of his circle, and now Whistler would answer with one of his own. He described his studio, porcelain and all, with Fantin and the English painter Albert Moore in black, Jo Hiffernan, his model and companion, in white on the sofa, and a woman in a Japanese robe seen from behind. It would stand about ten feet tall. This small sketch on paper is as far as the plan got. Fantin and Moore never appear, and the large canvas was never painted. The porcelain is there on the shelves at the left, with Whistler at the right holding his palette. In 1895 he took the sketch up again to touch up one of the small heads.