James Whistler and Chinese Porcelain

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American artist. He was averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting. Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks is an oil on canvas painting and it is showed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This work was designed to suggest the curious conflation of a life-sized oil portrait with the decorative design on a Chinese porcelain vase. The painting represents the figure of Christina Spartali dressed in a kimono, her pale face and black hair set against the oddly vaporous gray paint in the upper section of the image, where the artist signed his canvas in large letters. In contrast to the mistiness of the gray paint in this upper band, the rest of the painting below presents to the viewer a variety of decorative surfaces rendered as flatly brushed patches, spots, dashes, and streaks of pigment.