The Master Smith of Lyme Regis

In the autumn of 1895 Whistler was on his own in Lyme Regis, a small Dorset resort out of season, writing home that the wind and the rain made it the dreariest seaside he knew. His wife Beatrice was in a London hotel, seriously ill with cancer. The dealer David Croal Thomson came down to see what he was painting, and once Thomson was back in town Whistler wrote asking him not to mention this picture to her, because he wanted to keep it as a surprise.

The man is the town blacksmith, one of the Govier family, whose forge stood up a narrow passage off Broad Street, the same street where Whistler had taken a room to paint in. He stands half-length against a dark brown ground, arms folded, a black jacket over a white shirt with no collar. The paint is thin, laid over a red ground, and parts of the face were rubbed down as Whistler worked. He began it in Lyme and finished it in his London studio. When a New York dealer heard about a fine blacksmith and asked for it, Whistler warned him the price would seem alarming. Before it was shipped he carried it round to show his friends the Pennells, later his biographers, and they remembered how reluctant he was to let it go. It was in the dealer's hands by the end of June 1896. Beatrice had died in May.