DANIEL E. SUTHERLAND - LETTERS FROM AMERICA At this festive time of the year (I am writing in mid-December), I always enjoy reading two Christmas classics: Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle.” Yes, the latter really is a Christmas tale, celebrating, as Sherlock Holmes himself reminds us, “the season of forgiveness.” It also reminds me of the many similarities between Holmes and James Whistler. Naturally, they differ in some way
Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell say that Whistler and Beatrice chose the site together. The reliability of the Pennells’ reporting aside, Whistler fancied St. Nicholas as his last stop on earth for two reasons.
There is no doubt that Whistler was born in the United States. Even he, except for the Ruskin trial, when he swore to have been born in St. Petersburg, Russia, never denied that fact. For him, it was merely a question of where in the United States he had been born, and that was a moveable feast.
The Journal begins with Patricia de Montfort, who teaches art history at the University of Glasgow, where she is also Research Curator for the Whistler Collection at the Hunterian. In Whistler’s Late Portraits of Ethel Birnie in the Hunterian Collection, it is interesting to have contemporary photographs of the sitter to compare with Whistler’s paintings of his sister-in-law, and the documentation of the artist’s dissatisfaction with his work and obsessive repainting. In the
