James McNeill Whistler

A Shop with a Balcony

Date c. 1899
Materials Oil on wood
Dimensions 22.3 cm x 13.7 cm
Marks None
Further information GLAHA 46389.
Andrew McLaren Young, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1980 (526, plate 337).

Note This shows a shop in a side street in Dieppe, France. Whistler drew the details of the building in pencil and then painted over it with oil paint thinned until it was runny like watercolour paint. Notice that Whistler included several figures to add visual interest to the scene. Two women and a child can be seen on the balcony, and a woman and a dog in the doorway. However, they are only roughly painted in and we cannot see details such as faces and expressions. In this way they become part of the decorative arrangement of colour and shape. By focusing on the building close up, he transformed it into a flat, patterned surface. Look how many different shapes he found in the building: squares and rectangles in the windows, doorway and shop panels, a semi-circular archway and triangles and diamonds on the balcony railings.