A Study in Black and White, Mrs Henrietta Riviere (daughter-in-law of the artist)

A Study in Black and White, Mrs Henrietta Rivière, painted in 1910 and in the Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, is a portrait of the artist's daughter-in-law, combining formal portraiture with the aesthetic conceit of limiting the palette to near-monochrome. Such exercises in chromatic restraint were associated with James McNeill Whistler's Arrangements and Symphonies, which had made tonal harmony and the reduction of descriptive colour fashionable in British painting from the 1870s onward. Rivière's adoption of this formula for a family portrait suggests an awareness of its prestige even among painters whose primary subjects lay elsewhere. The Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, houses a significant collection of British painting.

The restriction to black and white — the sitter's clothing, the background, and the flesh tones forming the only tonal variety — places extreme demands on Rivière's handling of value. Every distinction of texture, form, and depth must be achieved through tonal gradation alone. The challenge transforms a conventional portrait into a study of painting's fundamental mechanics.