Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl

Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl is the painting through which James McNeill Whistler made his claim that a picture could be a harmony of color rather than the telling of a tale, the same contention that would embroil him in the celebrated quarrel with Ruskin over his nocturnes. The sitter, his companion Jo Hiffernan, is set against a mantelpiece, and the canvas’s restrained whites and hints of Japanese design announced the programme of the Aesthetic movement well before its vogue. Long in the collection of the Tate in London, it stands among the founding statements of art for art’s sake in Britain.