Violet and Rose: La Belle de Jour

Whistler's 'Violet and Rose: La Belle de Jour' (1885) belongs to his series of female figure subjects in which his tonal harmony approach was applied to the dressed or undressed female form in interior settings. The title's color designation — violet and rose — announces the painting's primary formal concern: the harmonization of these two tonal colors within a unified compositional field. His 'La Belle de Jour' subjects combined the long tradition of the fashionably dressed woman with his own Aesthetic Movement concern for painting as tonal and coloristic harmony.

Whistler's treatment of violet and rose as a color harmony creates a painting organized around the relationship between these two adjacent tonal colors — their combination creating the decorative unity he sought in all his titled harmony series. The female figure is the vehicle for this color investigation rather than its primary subject. His handling reduces the woman's dress, setting, and figure to essential tonal relationships within the named harmonic scheme.