The Yellow Roomca. 1883–84
A woman appears in a small interior washed with warm yellow, near a fireplace, in this watercolour and gouache of the early 1880s. More about this work
About this work
A woman appears in a small interior washed with warm yellow, near a fireplace, in this watercolour and gouache of the early 1880s. Yellow was a favourite colour of Whistler’s for interiors, and in 1883 he decorated a London exhibition of his own etchings entirely in yellow and white. Here broad, liquid washes reduce the room to a few harmonies of colour and shape, the kind of small, intimate work he made alongside his grand portraits.
Written by Ochre Editions.
How it was made
- Opaque watercolour
- Watercolour made opaque with white or chalk and laid in flat, even layers. Persian and Indian painters ground their colours from minerals, applied them with the finest brushes and burnished the finished page.
- Watercolour
- Pigment in gum arabic, thinned with water and laid in transparent washes. Nothing white is painted: the light is the paper showing through.
James McNeill Whistler
American, 1834–1903 · Born in Lowell, Massachusetts; died in London.
Whistler spent part of his boyhood in Russia, left West Point without graduating and trained as a painter in Paris before settling in London in 1859. He held that a picture was an arrangement of colour and form, and named his works symphonies, harmonies and nocturnes; a hostile review of one nocturne led to his 1878 libel suit against John Ruskin. He was equally committed to etching, and in his Venice plates of 1879–80 he left films of ink on the copper to suggest water and dusk.
Written by Ochre Editions.
Rights and the museum’s record
Public domain. The Met has dedicated this image to the public domain under CC0, so anyone may copy, adapt and use it, for any purpose, without asking. Our prints and files are reproductions made from the museum’s image; the museum doesn’t endorse them.
- Object number
- 2017.664
- Credit
- Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Type
- Watercolor
- Department
- The American Wing
- Licence
- CC0 1.0 Universal
- Museum record
- See it on the museum’s site
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