Art Institute of Chicago

The Duet

James McNeill Whistler

Date

1894

Medium

Transfer lithograph in black on cream laid paper

Culture

United States

Department

Prints and Drawings

Institution

Art Institute of Chicago

Similar to many other artists of the period, Whistler relied on family members to serve as models. Relatives sometimes posed for formal works but were often pictured in everyday settings. Many of the resulting prints and drawings are charmingly casual, as exemplified by these domestic images of Whistler’s wife and two of her sisters. In one, Beatrice Whistler and her younger sister Ethel Whibley play a four-hand piano piece in the comfortable, lamp-lit salon of the Whistlers’ home in Paris. The other lithograph, which shows Beatrice’s youngest sister, Rosalind Birnie Philip, is more poignant. Whistler drew her as she sat by Beatrice’s sickbed in a London hotel room, several months before Beatrice’s death.

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