Are you interested in old china? This artistic abode of my son is ornamented by a very rare collection of Japanese and Chinese. He considers the paintings upon them the finest specimens of art, and his companions (artists), who resort here for an evening's relaxation, occasionally get enthusiastic as they handle and examine the curious figures portrayed.

Anna Whistler's letter to a friend in America, written from 7 Lindsey Row in Chelsea in February 1864, chronicles the first flush of Whistler's enthusiasm for collecting Oriental porcelain. Twice in the three months after this letter was written, Whistler was in Paris, both times to visit La Porte Chinoise at 6 rue Vivienne and the establishment of E. Desoye in the rue de Rivoli, both of which sold Japanese prints, textiles, screens, and china.

Many of the bowls and jars from the Kangxi (1662–1722), Yongzheng (1723–35), and Qianlong (1736–95) periods that he bought there found their way into the paintings of this period, and it is through their common interest in collecting blue and white that he cemented a number of important friendships with Rossetti and Tissot, and with his future patrons Alexander, Leyland, Huth, and Sir Henry Thompson .

In the letter quoted above, Anna mentioned that her son was finishing this picture, the first of his works to draw directly on Chinese and Japanese art. Her description cannot be bettered:

A girl seated, as if intent upon painting a beautiful jar, which she rests upon her lap. She sits beside a shelf which is covered with matting, a buff color, upon which several pieces of china and a pretty fan are arranged, as if for purchasers; a Scinde rug carpets the floor. Upon it by her side is a large jar, and all these are facsimiles of those in this room. There is a table covered with a crimson cloth, upon which there is a cup (Japanese), scarlet in hue, a sofa covered with buff matting too, but each so distinctly separate, even the shadow of the handle of the fan.

'The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks' refers to the decorative figures that form the maker's marks, which appear on rare pieces of blue and white china. 'Lange Leizen' is Dutch slang for 'Long Elizas.' The six Chinese characters around the frame, copied from the bottom of a piece of blue and white porcelain, read (clockwise from the upper right-hand corner): 1. Great; 2. Ching; 3. K'ang; 4. Hsi; 5. Year; 6. Made ('Made during the reign of the Emperor Kangxi of the Great Qing [Manchu] Dynasty').

As with 'The White Girl' and 'Wapping' , Whistler subverts a possible reading of the scene as a conventional Victorian genre painting by identifying the figure as a European woman posing in a studio for an artist. He gives her Caucasian features and hoop earrings and seats her on what looks like a flimsy wooden European chair, of the sort one might find in an artist's studio. Her Chinese robe has the air of a garment from the dressing-up box, or perhaps the robe a professional model would wear between poses in a life class. The shallow space is entirely Western in character.

As in 'Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen' (1864) and 'La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine' (1863–4), Whistler still has not incorporated Japanese principles of color and design into his pictures. The Oriental accessories remain just that: accessories to enliven a composition which is relatively unadventurous in comparison to 'Harmony in Green and Rose: The Music Room' (1860–1).

In May 1863, Whistler was in Amsterdam with Alphonse Legros, looking for blue and white china and also looking at the seventeenth-century Dutch school of genre painters, with their dark interiors, cool even light, and sensuously painted still-life details. His own 'At the Piano' suggests that he was aware of the paintings of Vermeer, just then being rediscovered in avant-garde artistic circles. The first owner of 22, the art dealer Ernest Gambart, became a noted patron of the Dutch genre painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, whose glossy evocations of Greek and Roman life make an interesting contrast to Whistler's more searching painterly technique.

Finally, the subject of the picture, a woman painting a porcelain vase in what is clearly a shop, may reflect Whistler's awareness of a great new enterprise recently undertaken by the circle of artists with whom he was friendly. This was the establishment of the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861, specializing in the manufacture of the decorative arts by artists such as William Morris, Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, and Rossetti.

When Whistler showed 'The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks' with 'Wapping' at the Royal Academy of 1864, William Michael Rossetti singled out both pictures as the most thoroughly satisfying works in the Academy. Thinking of the deep purple dye of the Chinese robe, the rose color on the sleeves of the kimono, and the touches of deep magenta and orange, he wrote that he considered the 'Lange Leizen' the most delightful piece of color on the walls. This praise was echoed by other critics, with the exception of Tom Taylor in *The Times*, who castigated Whistler for 'slovenliness of execution' and objected to the faulty perspective of the large blue and white jar on the right.

Inventory number:

Cat. 1112 

Provenance:

Purchased from the artist by James Leathart (1820–1895), Newcastle, 1864 [1]; sold to John G. Johnson (1841–1917), Philadelphia, through Goupil Gallery, London, April 1893 [2]; bequest to the City of Philadelphia, 1917.1. There were rumors, probably perpetuated by Whistler, that he sold the work to Paris dealer Ernest Gambart (1814–1902) for 100 pounds. In fact, Whistler later reported that he quietly sold the painting to Leathart for 80 pounds. See Linda Merrill, “Whistler and the ‘Lange Lijzen,’” Burlington Magazine, vol. 136 (October 1994), pp. 686–87.2. The painting stayed with Goupil from the 1892 exhibition (Nocturnes, Marines and Chevalet Pieces, March–April 1892) until its sale to Johnson. David Croal Thomson (1855–1930) at Goupil wrote to Whistler on April 12, 1893, that they had negotiated the sale with Johnson and “arranged the matter with the Newcastle owner” (Glasgow University Library, MS Whistler T117). Leathart was ill in 1892 and irritated that the gallery charged him for cleaning the painting prior to its exhibition.