Whistler's painting Nocturne in Black and Gold

Friday Forum "Whistler and the World of Impressionism at the Musée du Luxembourg circa 1900"

Dr. Alexis Clark

In the annals of nineteenth-century art history, the Musée du Luxembourg has been best remembered for its beleaguered and ultimately botched acceptance of the Caillebotte Bequest, which transferred dozens of Impressionist paintings and works on paper to the French state. Despite its reluctance to accept that collection, the Luxembourg, as this talk seeks to demonstrate, promoted Impressionism to bolster its international reputation.

Between 1894 (the date of the Bequest) and 1904 (the date of James McNeill Whistler’s death), the museum worked to write a world history of Impressionism, one that interestingly emphasized the importance of Whistler to the dissemination of that style. Whistler thus played a key role in that history, narrated on the museum walls and in its exhibition catalogue: his particular impressionist tache (mark) defied tendencies to classify nineteenth-century on strictly national lines. This talk traces Whistler’s relation to the conception of world Impressionism circa 1900 as it came to be exhibited, narrated, and initially codified by the Luxembourg.