Al piano

Whistler painted this over the winter of 1858 while staying with his half-sister Deborah in London, a few months after their father's death. She stands at the piano in black, her small daughter Annie listening in white. When he sent it to the Paris Salon in 1859 the jury turned it down, so he hung it instead in a fellow painter's studio alongside other rejected canvases by young friends like Fantin-Latour. That informal show got it noticed. It is the picture people point to as the first where Whistler found his own balance of tones and quiet. The two figures divide the canvas cleanly, the black gown answering the dark underside of the raised piano lid.