This volume brings together papers that were first presented in October 2011 at an international symposium held at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art. Made possible by the generosity of the Lunder Foundation, “Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism” was the inaugural event of the Lunder Consortium for Whistler Studies, a scholarly partnership founded in 2010 by the Freer Gallery, the Colby College Museum of Art, and the University of Glasgow. The Art Institute of Chicago joined in 2012. As caretakers of the world’s largest collections of the work of James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), the consortium is not only dedicated to supporting and disseminating new research on the American expatriate artist but also encouraging scholarship that moves beyond monographic or biographical approaches to consider the various “art worlds” in which Whistler and his contemporaries operated. The diversity of topics and methodologies deployed at this landmark conference reflected this expansive, pluralizing approach. In addition to reflecting on Whistler’s place in the history of art, speakers considered such diverse topics as the construction of aesthetic subjectivities, the relationship between Aestheticism and commodity culture, and the role of global networks in the transmission and reception of Whistlerian style. Gathered together, these conference proceedings challenge preconceptions about Aestheticism and Whistler’s place within the Aesthetic movement. This notoriously thinskinned painter, who had a particular talent for “the gentle art of making enemies,” was also profoundly interconnected to a cosmopolitan array of artists, writers, collectors, and dealers. Here, authors convincingly overturn the long-held notion of Whistler as an eccentric loner who operated outside of conventional art historical narratives, whether American, British, or modernist. Networks, mutual infl uences, collaborative endeavors, and the enduring power of artistic creation and aesthetic attention are some of the themes that recur throughout this book. Far from being conclusive, these essays open up the field of Whistler studies and will doubtless inspire new work on Whistler’s aesthetic vision and the complexity of his cultural contexts.

Recasting Antiquity: Whistler, Tanagra, & the Female Form surveys a series of works on paper by James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), the American artist best known for the poignant portrait of his aging mother. These pictures are of a very different order: although Whistler referred to them simply as “draped & nude figures,” scholars and collectors have tended to call them “Tanagras” after the Hellenistic terracotta statuettes unearthed in the early 1870s in the necropolis of the ancient Boeotian city of Tanagra. The figurines, which date to the third and fourth centuries BCE, were brand new to the nineteenth century. As one antiquarian observed in 1879, “Their principal charm consists in the fact that they are completely different from any other antiques we know.” Small in scale and informal in style, they typically represent ordinary mortals rather than gods and heroes, making them easy to understand and appreciate. Ancient Tanagras depicting elegant young women tightly wrapped in swathes of drapery held the most appeal for nineteenth-century viewers and collectors. The related works by Whistler, mostly lithographs, depict the female model either nude or draped in semitransparent fabric. Despite that salient difference, the modern and ancient works share what Whistler’s biographer described as “the same flawless daintiness, the same purity of pose, the same harmony of line, the same grace of contour.” Recasting Antiquity, by juxtaposing Whistler’s “Tanagras” with the objects of their inspiration, invites consideration of the nineteenth-century taste for the figurines and what it may reveal about changing attitudes toward classical antiquity and conventional Western notions of femininity.