Harmony in Blue and Violet: Miss Finch

Whistler's 'Harmony in Blue and Violet: Miss Finch' (1885) is the companion to his coral and blue portrait of the same sitter — the two together constituting an experiment in how the same subject could be approached through different harmonic color schemes. Blue and violet create a cool harmonic pairing that gives this portrait a different emotional temperature from its companion. The two portraits together demonstrate Whistler's consistent preoccupation with how color harmony transforms the perception of subject matter.

The blue and violet harmony creates a distinctly cooler atmosphere than the coral and blue companion portrait — the same sitter in different light or different dress, the entire picture's color organized around this cool harmonic relationship. Whistler's characteristic thin, delicate paint surface allows the colors to interact with the quality of translucent glazes rather than the opacity of conventional oil paint. His compositional simplicity focuses all attention on the harmonic relationship between colors.