The exhibition James McNeill Whistler, now on at Tate Britain, is the first major European exhibition of this nineteenth century painter and printmaker for thirty years. Curated by Dr Carol Jacobi (Tate’s Curator of British Art 1850-1915), the show features many of Whistler’s now well-known works, such as Symphony in White, No 2: The Little White Girl (1864) and Wapping (1860-1864), as well as countless etchings, sketches and notebooks (including items on loan from The Hunterian, University of Glasgow). The exhibition raised a wide array of themes, many of which were explored in detail in the related Tate conference Whistler in Action, organised by Dr Isobel Muir (Tate’s Assistant Curator of 19th Century British Art). In eight panels, this two-day conference addressed Whistler’s cosmopolitan identity, his relation to abstraction, his analogies with musical genres, his conversations with East Asian art, his legacy and more.
The opening panel of the Tate Conference ‘Whistler in Action’. From left to right: Elena Cooper, Deborah Lim, Anastasia Belyaeva and Tate curator Dr Carol Jacobi.
‘Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket’ (1875) by Whistler (image: wikimedia commons).
One facet explored by both the exhibition and the conference’s opening panel chaired by Jacobi – comprising the Whistler scholars Dr Deborah Lim and Dr Anastasia Belyaeva, as well as CREATe’s Dr Elena Cooper – was the concept of ‘finish’.
In the exhibition, ‘finish’ is approached primarily in aesthetic terms: Whistler’s quick, visible and varied brushstrokes, distinguished his art-works from dominant ways of working of his time. As Jacobi argued, in opening the conference, Whistler approached painting as equivalent to visual experience; his paintings sought to provide an optical impression of what he saw in nature, e.g. the impression of a firework in Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875) – see image. Therefore, in Whistler’s view, the less ‘finished’ a painting appeared (e.g. the less neat, exact and seamless the brushstrokes) the more present is the viewer in experiencing nature through his work.
How does this conference relate to law and research at CREATe? As art historians well know, Whistler frequently resorted to the law throughout his lifetime. In an excellent essay in the exhibition catalogue Dr Grischka Petri brings these legal cases together, presenting them as now ‘famous episodes’ in his biography and indicating aspects of his mischievous personality. However, as CREATe’s Dr Elena Cooper explained in her conference presentation, Whistler’s innovative stance towards ‘finish’ – through the related question of when a work can be considered finished and who should decide that it is finished – also contributed to the development of the law.
Interestingly, Whistler’s contribution to legal development is not seen in Whistler v Ruskin heard by the Court of Queen’s Bench in 1878 (a defamation action about whether The Falling Rocket, due to its lack of ‘finish’, could be described the art critic John Ruskin, amongst other things, as ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’) as this involved contested issues of fact, not law. Rather, Whistler’s influence on legal change is seen in the French case of Whistler v Eden (1897), a case which has been described by one legal scholar as having ‘fixed’ the moral right of disclosure – ‘perhaps the most fundamental of… authorial rights’ – ‘in the French canon’ (Adeney, The Moral Rights of Authors and Performers, 2006, pp. 44 and 45).
What was this case about? Whistler v Eden concerned a dispute between Whistler and a commissioner, Sir William Eden, who had asked Whistler to paint his wife, Lady Eden. Lady Eden sat for her portrait in Whistler’s studio, and then, considering the painting to be complete, Eden paid the price and demanded delivery of the painting. However, despite the fact that Whistler had, on his own accord, publicly exhibited the painting, Whistler refused to deliver the painting to Sir William; Whistler claimed that the painting was not yet finished.
While Whistler was obliged financially to compensate Sir William and return the purchase price, the judgment of the Paris Court of Appeal (approved by the Supreme Court) held that ‘the artist is the master and proprietor of his work till such time as it shall please him to deliver it and give up the holding thereof’. This followed from the submissions made by Whistler, through his lawyer, in court: ‘you cannot oblige an artist, to give up an unfinished work and allow the incomplete creations of his heart and brain to circulate the world.’ Whistler v Eden, now considered foundational to French moral rights, is an example of the law enabling the realisation of artistic intention: finish was a matter for the artist to determine alone. Therefore, Whistler’s ideas about ‘finish’, through the related question of who has the power to determine when a painting is finished, laid the groundwork not just for innovation in art, but also law.
The exhibition James McNeill Whistler is on at Tate Britain, London, until 27 September 2026. The full programme for the accompanying Tate conference Whistler in Action can be found here. More on Whistler v Eden can be found in Elena’s article ‘Donor Restrictions and Whistler’s Portrait of Lady Eden’, Art Antiquity and Law, 2023, part of a Special Issue which Elena co-edited with Steph Scholten, Director, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow.