The Gold Scab by James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Submitted by Carol Goodman

Dangerous Beauty: James Abbott Mcneill Whistler and The Gold Scab

FIGURE A

James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
The Gold Scab:  Eruption inFrilthy Lucre (The Creditor), 1879
Oil on Canvas, 73 ½ x 55 in.
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

            As a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement, James Abbott McNeill Whistler believed that “art should exist for its own sake, independent of moralizing didacticism or narrative concerns.”[1]  He was a modernist, interested in the formal aspects of art – how line, form, and color artfully arranged created a harmonious effect. Whistler wanted “a response to [his art’s] formal beauty rather than its subject matter.”[2]  In his 1879 oil on canvas painting, The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor) [Figure A],  Whistler ostensibly adheres to his artistic principles by using color, line, form, repetition and pattern to envelop the viewer in an initial sensation of beauty and unity.  But, in short order, Whistler pulls an audacious bait-and-switch, ditching his artistic principles, while trapping the viewer in a hellish and seemingly indecipherable mise en scène with a macabre creature.

      What first ensnares the viewer, is The Scab’s all-encompassing saturated peacock-blue color palette, with little modulation or gradation.   A large portion of the painting’s positive space, as well as all of the painting’s negative space, is this predominant hue.  This large color block creates a flattened perspectival picture plane, where foreground and background seamlessly blend into one another.[3]  It’s as if the viewer were plunged into an aquatic netherworld, with no escape hatch.  

       As the viewer collects herself,  her eyes are chaperoned around the canvas by more color and line.  There are touches of warm, repetitive butter yellow and cantaloupe orange,  intermittently placed,  that encircle the canvas, generating a sense of syncopation and rhythm.[4] Large blocks of buttermilk, beige and ivory, outlined in black, summon the viewer’s rapt attention.  Atop ivory and black piano keys are a sharp, ferocious pair of claws playing the piano.  The claws are attached to, YIKES, an alarming hybrid specimen!  The piano itself is depicted in a sketch-like, abstracted fashion. Garnishing the top of the piano is sheet music – with the painting’s name inscribed on it – as well as an array of circular objects, perhaps notional objets d’ art,  that in actuality look more like ghoulish jack-o-lanterns with jeering orange eyes.

       Next, the viewer notices a simplified portrayal of a beige-ivory house with a peacock-blue angled roof.  This house illogically serves as the piano “stool.”  The diagonal black outlines of the ivory piano keys and the roof of the house form a “v-shaped” pincer.  In its maw, where the viewer’s gaze is directed, is that hybrid specimen!  He is unavaoidable, with his fierce male human face and  pronounced hunchback.  He reminds the viewer of Nosferatu! (Figure B).  The creature’s entire body from neck-down is covered with an arabesque pattern of peacock-blue to black semi-circular scales.  The scales conjure up a slimey tactile (textural) sensation. Larger semi-circular shapes appear again mysteriously in front of the piano, creating more repetition, rhythm and decorative effect.   

 

FIGURE B

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Movie, Nosferatu
Note how Nosferatu’s body shape – hunchback,
 bowed head, and claws look just like Whistler’s hybrid creature.  SPOOKY!

 

       The beast has a long fan-like tail and attenuated legs ending in predatory talons.  The scale and proportion of the creature, piano and house vis à vis one another is distorted. The house and piano are smaller, less detailed geometric forms that recede in the presence of the creature, who is larger and ornately described.  His sinewy, curvilinear organic form makes him the beautiful/horrifying focal point of the painting. He is part magic, part monster.

       Finally, lurking in the upper right hand corner of the canvas is an almost cartoonish black appartion. From its mouth springs a calligraphic line, sugesting an arrow, pointed at the creature’s neck.

         When Whistler’s contemporaries first saw The Gold Scab, many would have immediately understood that the “face” of the apparition in the top right of the canvas was Whistler himself.  He had adopted this butterfly symbol as his monogram, “signing” his paintings with it.[5]  Contemporaries would also have recognized the hybrid creature’s face as the face of the artist’s former patron, F.R Leyland, a wealthy Liverpool shipping magnate.  In happier days, Whistler had even been commissioned to paint Leyland’s portrait [Figure C].    But in 1879, Whistler was thrown into bankruptcy as a result of his ill-conceived libel lawsuit against the renowned art critic, John Ruskin.  Leyland was one of Whistler’s major creditors.[6]  In The Gold Scab Whistler’s arrow is aimed directly at the hybrid creature/Leyland’s jugular vein.  This is an assasination taking place – a brutal character assasination! 

FIGURE C
  James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Arrangement in Black: Portrait of F.R. Leyland, 1870-73
Oil on Canvas, 75 7/8 x 36 1/8 in.
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution

        So, with Whistler’s deft knowledge of color, line, form, repetition and pattern the unsuspecting viewer is bewitched and enticed into Whistler’s personal world of grievance and vengeance against Leyland.   Jettisoning his contempt for moralizing narratives, Whistler has hijacked the viewer and dropped her into the stewing cauldron of his personal melodrama with Leyland.  The Gold Scab turns Whistler’s art for art’s sake philosophies and pretensions on their head!   Instead, Whistler has served up an excoriating cri de coeur.

 

 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

 Photograph by London Stereoscopic Company, 1878

                                            

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[1]      Monica Kjellman-Chapin. “Aesthetic Movement.” In Art in Time: A World History of Styles and Movements, ed. Tom Melick, (London: Phaidon, 2014), 220.

[2]      Ian Chilvers, ed. Art: The Definitive Visual Guide, 2^nd ed. (New York: Dorling Kindersley, 2018), 392.

[3]      Margaret F. MacDonald, “Joanna Hiffernan and James Whistler: An Artistic Partnership,” in The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James Whistler, ed. Margaret MacDonald (Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2020), 23.  Whistler was an avid collector of Japanese woodblock prints.  Like many of his avant-garde contemporaries, he was influenced by their large blocks of color and flattened perspective.

[4]     Daniel E. Sutherland, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 120.  Whistler called these touches “threads,” and believed that like “embroidery stitches” they helped “hold the composition together.”

[5]      Ibid., 115. The butterfly became Whistler’s trademark as well as his nickname.

[6]      Ibid., 165.  Sutherland provides details about the Ruskin lawsuit. Despite “winning” the lawsuit, it was a Pyrrhic victory for Whistler as he was awarded a mere pittance in damages.  Whistler left London for Venice and became, in his own words, “the most famous pauper in the world.”