WEARY
STUDY IN CHALK
Formerly in the possession of B. B. MacGeorge, Esq.
The picture Mr. Jameson refers to was called Three Figures, Pink and Grey,[5] in the London Memorial Exhibition. It alone was carried out of the Six or Eight Schemes or Projects in which Whistler was trying to combine Japanese and classical motives, expressing a beauty of form and design that haunted him, and was perhaps best realised in some of the pastel studies. He never ceased to make these studies. There are pastels, chalk drawings, and etchings in which the separate figures of the Projects may be found, studies for the series; one was worked out as a fan, another like a cameo. The second version of the Three Figures, enlarged from a smaller design, Whistler explained to Mr. Alan S. Cole, was an arrangement he wanted to paint, and he then drew, with a sweep of the brush, the back of the stooping figure to show what he meant. W. M. Rossetti most likely referred to it when he wrote in his diary for July 28, 1867:
"Whistler is doing on a largish scale for Leyland the subject of women with flowers, and has made coloured sketches of four or five other subjects of the like class, very promising in point of conception of colour and arrangement."
The Projects were his first scheme of decoration for Leyland. The canvases are about the same size. They are painted with liquid colour, the canvas often showing through. The handling in all save the Venus, shown in the Paris Memorial Exhibition and worked on in his later years, is more direct than anything he ever did. They have the same relation to his pictures as the sketches of Rubens and Tiepolo to their decorations. The Venus is a single figure, the rest are groups arranged against a balustrade, round a vase of flowers, or on the sands by the sea. Their floating draperies give the scheme of