Mother of Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian

Whistler's Mother of Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian (1888) belongs to his late series of full-length female figures — works that continued his aesthetic program of reducing the figure to harmonies of tone and color analogous to musical composition. The 'Andalusian' designation suggests a Spanish model or costume, connecting the work to the Hispanic fascination that ran through late nineteenth-century European aesthetics from Manet onward. Now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the painting represents Whistler's most refined and characteristically subtle approach to the female figure as pure aesthetic subject.

The painting demonstrates Whistler's signature tonal economy — the figure built in delicate gradations of silver and pearl with only the most restrained accents of warmer color. His 'sauce' technique — paint thinned and floated on the canvas — creates the atmospheric, almost immaterial quality that distinguished his work from the thicker, more assertive handling of his contemporaries.