George W. Vanderbilt

George W. Vanderbilt II was among the wealthiest Americans of the Gilded Age, and his 1900 portrait by Whistler — now at the National Gallery of Art — represents one of the artist's late aristocratic commissions. Whistler had long cultivated the portrait of cultivated men and women as his primary genre, and Vanderbilt, the builder of Biltmore, was precisely the kind of aesthetically minded patron the artist sought. Whistler's elongated, tonal approach to portraiture was by 1900 enormously influential.

Whistler's signature tonal method is on full display: the background dissolves into atmospheric near-darkness, and Vanderbilt's figure emerges in restrained, closely keyed tones. The brushwork is spare and selective — nothing is laboured. The palette is almost monochromatic, with only the face receiving concentrated attention.