Tag: James McNeill Whistler

You have too many white walls.  More colour is wanted.  You should have such men as Whistler among you to teach you the beauty and joy of colour.  Take Mr. Whistler’s ‘Symphony in White,’ which you no doubt have imagined to be something quite bizarre.  It is nothing of the sort.  Think of a cool grey sky flecked here and there with white clouds, a grey ocean and three wonderfully beautiful figures robed in white, leaning over the water and dropping white flowers from their fingers.  Here is no extensive intellectual scheme to trouble you, and no metaphysics of which we have had quite enough in art.  But if the simple and unaided colour strike the right key-note, the whole conception is made clear.  I regard Mr. Whistler’s famous Peacock Room as the finest thing in colour and art decoration which the world has known since Correggio painted that wonderful room in Italy where the little children are dancing on the walls.  Mr. Whistler finished another room just before I came away—a breakfast room in blue and yellow.  The ceiling was a light blue, the cabinet-work and the furniture were of a yellow wood, the curtains at the windows were white and worked in yellow, and when the table was set for breakfast with dainty blue china nothing can be conceived at once so simple and so joyous.

The fault which I have observed in most of your rooms is that there is apparent no definite scheme of colour.  Everything is not attuned to a key-note as it should be.  The apartments are crowded with pretty things which have no relation to one another.  Again, your artists must decorate what is more simply useful.  In your art schools I found no attempt to decorate such things as the vessels for water.  I know of nothing uglier than the ordinary jug or pitcher.  A museum could be filled with the different kinds of water vessels which are used in hot countries.  Yet we continue to submit to the depressing jug with the handle all on one side.  I do not see the wisdom of decorating dinner-plates with sunsets and soup-plates with moonlight scenes.  I do not think it adds anything to the pleasure of the canvas-back duck to take it out of such glories.  Besides, we do not want a soup-plate whose bottom seems to vanish in the distance.  One feels neither safe nor comfortable under such conditions.  In fact, I did not find in the art schools of the country that the difference was explained between decorative and imaginative art.

From “House Decoration,” a lecture delivered by Oscar Wilde on his 1882 American tour.