human
I cannot tell what pleasures Or what pains were, What pale new loves and treasures New Years will bear, What beam will fall, what shower With grief or joy for dower. But one thing knows the flower, the flower is fair.
gpt
La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine (Whistler apparently was fond of using elaborate titles) is perhaps his finest work in vivid colouring. The colour differentiations are well placed, but the canvas, after all, looks too much like a huge Japanese print, painted in the Western style, which represents objects round and in relief, and not merely in flat tints. The placing of the screen with the face looming above it is as peculiar as it is attractive, but it is an arrangement that is strictly Japanese in character. Whistler began with painting detail, and only gradually learned to see life in a broader and more mysterious way. It is a portrait of Miss Christie Spartali, a real Rossetti type, daughter of the Consul-General for Greece in London in 1863. Her father did not like it; but Rossetti did, and sold it from his own studio to help Whistler along. Later it came into the possession of F. R. Leyland, and was used to decorate the
human
Peacock Room.