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The James McNeill Whistler Exhibition at the Tate Britain, London - June 28, 2026
www.ft.com/content/1e1847b9-7c3f-4d57-9aea-cb68949aecf9
www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/whistler?_gl=1*1e4m...
news.artnet.com/art-world/whistler-earliest-portrait-tate...
news.colby.edu/story/james-mcneill-whistler-retrospective...
telescoper.blog/2026/07/05/whistler-at-tate-britain/
A truly global figure, Whistler re-wrote the rules of what it meant to be an artist. He pioneered new and innovative techniques, creating astonishingly beautiful, ethereal visions of modern life that would earn him a place as one of the most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
This retrospective – the first major European exhibition of Whistler’s work in 30 years – brings together the artist’s world-famous paintings alongside rarely, or never seen, works. It includes exquisite portraits, drawings, prints, and designs, from as early as his teens in St. Petersburg to the enigmatic late self-portraits.
The exhibition presents both a boldly experimental artist and cosmopolitan celebrity, disrupting the conventions of Victorian society in pursuit of truth, beauty, and progress.
This exhibition brings together 150 artworks and offers a rare chance to explore the full range of James McNeill Whistler’s work. Visitors can see his paintings, drawings, prints and designs, including the famous Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, his series of nocturnes, and sketchbooks that have never been shown before.
The exhibition reveals Whistler as a bold and experimental artist who challenged Victorian society while pursuing beauty, truth and new artistic ideas.
www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/whistler/exhibition...
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"It’s an odd, ungainly, unforgettable portrait. Anna McNeill Whistler’s face is rigid, lightless and cold as she poses for her son. She’s like a carving from a medieval tomb sutured to an aesthete’s dream. Starbursts of silver dance on the curtain in front of her while she sits as grim as death. Yet by painting her in silhouette, absorbing her black dress into his personal vision, Whistler turns her into a symbol of art for art’s sake.
At least that’s one way of seeing the masterpiece lent by the Musée d’Orsay that stars in Tate Britain’s luscious, seductive blockbuster dedicated to the American painter who delighted and scandalised late Victorian Britain. He competed with Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde for leadership of the Aesthetic Movement which dared to say that art has no responsibility to depict real life or serve a moral purpose. The cosmic curtain and carefully composed pattern of Whistler’s Mother add up to the movement’s earliest manifesto: to ram the point home, he called it Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1. Even when I’m painting my mum, says Whistler, I “arrange” her.
Yet in this insightful show you see that, like Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, he himself is partly Mother. The abstract vision of the life beautiful and Anna McNeill Whistler’s bony reality are two sides of Whistler himself. Part of him wants to paint beauty for beauty’s sake while the other is a hard-bitten observer, suspicious of the very glitz he creates.
At the far end of the gallery from his mother hangs his raw 1860s masterpiece Wapping. The surface of the Thames glistens yellow and brown between a crowd of steamers and sailing boats in what was then the world’s most cosmopolitan port: the lurid colours of the water look lovely until you realise they’re probably caused by a scum of faeces, piss and god knows what else. In the foreground a woman and two men chat freely on the terrace of a dockside bar: Whistler’s model and lover Joanna Hiffernan leans back sensually.
It’s a louche, staggeringly honest evocation of modern city life. The only other artists who painted like this in 1860 were French. Whistler had recently spent time in Paris among the avant garde and imitated the rugged style of Courbet. But reality was becoming more complex. As industrial capitalism melted the past, Manet led the way in painting the flowing, alienated coolness of modern bars, cafes, boudoirs. In Wapping, Whistler brings a Manet-like eye to London. He also records the realities of the East End docks in black-lined etchings. Seafarers share stories at a Rotherhithe pub in front of a row of tall masts; longshoremen brood in silence over their drinks.
Then, in 1865, Whistler suddenly paints the sea as if it was a piece of silk decorated with white lace and a ribbon. Green and Grey, Channel is a stunning declaration of artistic independence. He takes the sea, the element humans can’t control, the roaring theme of Turner’s visions, and makes it a painterly plaything. It is all totally, explicitly artificial and brilliantly arrogant: where other artists might look at the sea with awe, Whistler regards it as much less real than himself, arranging it just as he arranges his mother.
This big show follows Whistler in this insistently subjective quest to arrange the world. It includes a reconstruction of The Peacock Room, the notoriously extravagant installation he made out of his patron Frederick Leyland’s dining room, ignoring Leyland’s wishes. At the heart of the simulation hangs the original cartoon for his depiction of himself and Leyland as fighting peacocks, jousting in mutual vainglory.
Was Whistler the first absolute modernist? His completely free celebrations of colour and pattern anticipate Klimt and Pollock. You can see here why he drew the very first public attack on abstract art when the veteran critic John Ruskin accused him of merely “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.
Ruskin was enraged by his paintings of fireworks over the Thames by night, even though they are accurate depictions: fireworks in the dark are so spaceless and mysterious that they do look abstract. In Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Fire Wheel, Whistler captures a spinning galaxy of blazing yellow in a black void flecked with red sparks.
Whistler's Mother shows a woman in a black dress and white headcovering sitting in profile against a grey wall
‘America’s Mona Lisa’: how chance, genius and cheap paint made Whistler’s Mother a masterpiece
That same hovering between fact and fantasia makes his c 1872-5 work Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge one of the most haunting pictures of London. Tiny flashes of gold fireworks hang in the twilight behind the support and gentle curve of the wooden structure, which could be a bridge in old Edo in a Hiroshige print. The Japanese prints and porcelain he collected reveal where Whistler got his ideal of an art that’s both abstract and accurate.
Yet you can’t just put on a kimono and escape your own skin. Whistler was his mother’s son. In Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl, Hiffernan poses beside a mantlepiece, holding a Japanese fan, gazing at a lustrous blue and white vase. Whistler captures the plays of light, glistening surfaces and luxuriance, yet the coup de grace is brutal: her face in the mirror is tired, lost, melancholic. All this beauty is a bore. She knows it and so does Whistler."
Jonathan Jones - The Guardian
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I'm having some yarn quantity issues, so have switched to toe-up to see how that might work. Plus it'll make the scales go the other way, so I might go up for this sock and down for the other and have a mirror-imaged set!
2. They didn't have a green that I liked so I picked a bright one and black. Mix main colour with a drop of black (start with less black and add more to make it the shade you want).
For our first project, we fired the enamel with torches, so we could see what happened as it went through the different stages of fusing. After getting two coats of the base layer on, we laid lumps and strings of enamel on top, heated them, and swirled them with a metal probe. I think it takes practice to create attractive designs this way. Mine is hardly lovely, but it was good as a learning piece.
Metal sample collection demonstrating knowledge of different craft techniques Eg. Annealing, enamelling and forming. Made January 2013.
1. I used Content aware fill to remove an unwanted shadow.
2. I used the healing brush to spot heal skin blemishes.
3. I used the curves tool to alter color and lighting.
Clearly a first-timer at the beer funnel races, this feet-first technique requires a 180-degree body rotation in order to begin the imbibation portion of the contest.
Rage against the Machine, Public Enemy, Cypress Hill, Wu-Tang Clan, Immortal Technique, EPMD, Talib Kweli, VOX, Chemist, Rukus
I chose black and red paint to show the pain expression during mother's pregnancy and even giving a birth.
Compositional Techniques: I used symmetry and leading lines.
Materials: I used a grass path in Golden Gate Park with the surrounding brush and my Nikon D80.
Idea: I was walking and came across this path and remembered that one of the easiest ways to get two compositional techniques in one photo was symmetry and leading lines, which is what I used. Walking in nature reminded me a lot of country music, so I decided that would be my genre for this picture.
Process: To take this picture, I got really close to the ground and angled the camera right in between the path lines. I made sure everything looked the same on both sides and snapped the picture. In editing, I tried to take away most of the noise and made sure to really bring out the green and the sunlight. The low number of materials really brings out the simplistic nature of the country and because of that, country music.
This technique came about whilst I was making the bleach technique cards.
Base: normal white cardstock
background: applied 3 colours of pigment inks randomly all over, heat dried it. Then went over the top with a contrasting pigment ink - just smooshing the ink straight from the inkpad to completely cover the entire card.
Before it dried I inked up my chosen rubber stamp and stamped directly onto the ink covered card. The result is what you see before you.
When you go over the first dried layer of ink with your second colour it doesn't completely obscure the colour underneath and when you stamp your image on, that also slightly lifts off some underlying colour - it's quite subtle but the effect is really good.
I then went on to stamping a few more elements to frame the card and Krylon edged the card before completing with some lace.
i have been working on different lighting techniques for the high key/low key challenge in my spc group and this is one i ended up with but didn't use....
with these edits, i used a texture layer and a ttv layer from borealnz. i used the textures because sooc just seemed a little boring, but then with the excessive edit i didn't want to use it for my spc entry....i wanted to try and keep it a little more natural for my entry.
so, now i have a handful of sp's that are quite out of the ordinary for me, but instead of hiding them away, i chose to make them public.....and that's just a bit out of my comfort zone. yikes!