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In the libel case James Abbott McNeill Whistler brought against art critic John Ruskin, one of the major points of contention was how long it had taken Whistler to create “Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.” Ruskin, in his barbed 1877 review of the painting, famously accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” The implication was that Whistler’s luminous spattering had taken hardly any time to make, and thus lacked value or artistic import. At least on the temporal front, Ruskin wasn’t entirely wrong. The trial judge was incensed to learn that the painting had been produced in a mere two days, and demanded that Whistler explain how he could charge so much money for so little effort. Whistler argued (convincingly enough to win his case) that it wasn’t just the moment of paintbrush to canvas that mattered, but all the time leading up to the gesture, the accrued expertise. It may look like nonchalance, but it was a very studied, very intentional, very much chalant nonchalance. “The Little Nude Model, Reading” is an extension of that ethos, a simple, quiet scene that seems breezily executed but carries the weight of decades. Whistler’s history with printmaking stretched back to the 1850s—after being kicked out of West Point in 1851 for collecting too many demerits and getting mouthy with his teachers, he was briefly employed as a draftsman at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey making etchings on government-owned copper plates of coastlines (which was in the job description) and doodled self-portraits (which was not). Later on, two distinct periods in the 1870s and 1880s/90s marked Whistler’s more autonomous exploration of lithography; particularly in the latter period, he was moving towards an ever softer and more atmospheric technique. As he told his friend the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, he wanted his prints to look like “the most delicate drawings out of a museum.” In other words, he was trying to make prints that didn’t look like prints at all. Erasing all traces of labor takes, as it turns out, quite a bit of work. Frustrated by the impressions left by plates and stones during the printing process, Whistler would literally trim away their marks from the edges of the paper. Before drawing a single line for a print, he would make the gesture over and over and over in the air, getting closer (to the plate, the stone, or the transfer paper) with each repetition until finally he committed it to some state of permanence. It was only in the 1890s that Whistler began calling his lithographs his “songs on stone,” feeling, finally, that he’d found a way for the prints to land on the paper more like butterflies than boulders. It was the process of transfer lithography that helped him achieve that state of lightness—rather than drawing directly onto the lithograph stone, the initial image was created with crayon or a greasy black liquid called tusche on coated paper, transferred to the stone, then transferred from the stone one last time onto print paper. The result was a whispery, pastel-like quality, on full display in “The Little Nude Model, Reading.” Of all the series of nudes Whistler produced in the 1880s and 90s, “The Little Nude Model, Reading” was his most in demand. The central figure (one of the Pettigrew sisters, famous for a beauty that evoked the curves and proportions of classical Greek sculptures as well as their openness about making their money through art modeling, a profession that was seen as being akin to sex work) has a soft and real solidity, while her surroundings—the corner of a mantel off to the left, the chest she leans against—are a world barely rendered, dashed off like perfect afterthoughts (T. R. Way, one of Whistler’s printers, called it an “economy of touch”). Both her insouciant pose and the scribbled dynamism of the line work feel spontaneous, but we know better by now. Nothing from Whistler’s hands lacks intent. “Nature is usually wrong,” Whistler proclaimed in his Ten O’Clock lecture of 1885. “That is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all.” It’s not just the French Symbolist mindset of suggestion over description (though this was important to Whistler’s artistic manifesto), but goes a step further to say that both the suggestion and the description might be creations of the artist. It’s not distilling out the imperfections within reality, but fabricating reality and then distilling until the seams disappear. And perhaps this is why “The Little Nude Model, Reading” became so beloved. She is the embodiment of Whistler’s artistic process. Casually graceful, shoulders hunched and hair just unkempt enough to appear off-the-cuff. Yet, what’s in her hand? A book, read intently, wrist arched in preparation to flip the page. The work is happening right in front of us, but we are seduced into not seeing it. And even if we do finally figure out the trick, Whistler’s already turned the page. The last pull of this image was done posthumously, in 1904, shortly after Whistler’s death. The stone was erased later the same year—no more song would come from it, the final trace of his labor gone. Interested in learning more about this work? Head here.
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