The Massachusetts-born artist spent most of his life and career abroad, traveling to Paris in 1855 and settling in London a few years later. Whistler ardently pursued atmospheric effects and color harmonies in his compositions, using subject matter not for its own sake, but as a means to an end. This especially unnerved the art world in the early 1870s when he debuted his Nocturnes—urban river scenes pared down to their material essences—evoking form and mood by means of thinly stained canvases and gradations of color.
James McNeill Whistler
Over the years, the sea likewise captured Whistler’s attention as an ever-changing aspect of nature enabling such aesthetic explorations. Along the coast of Brittany, France, in the summer of 1893, Whistler painted Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea, a striking and spare arrangement of water, sky, and clouds.
Pre-treatment image of Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea, 1893
The artist hired a boatman to take him out to sea so that he could observe the surroundings during varying effects of light and weather. The composition’s low vantage point evokes being on the water—Whistler may well have painted the work while aboard the vessel, or else recalled the experience back in his studio.
Whistler titled his paintings in tune with his careful attention to color harmonies. And so, with Violet and Silver feeling more like Green and Yellow, as conservation and curatorial colleagues we decided that it was time to look closely at the painting’s surface and determine a treatment plan.
Though Violet and Silver had never been treated at the Art Institute, it was clear that the painting had been varnished, cleaned, and revarnished multiple times prior to its arrival at the museum in 1955. The painting itself was in very good condition but the surface coatings were visibly yellowed and patchy, making the composition difficult to read. And Whistler’s carefully calibrated hues were radically skewed: the water was murky green, the puffy clouds appeared yellow, and the sky looked turquoise and dingy.
Pre-treatment image of Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea (detail), 1893
To help us better understand the nature of the surface coatings, museum scientists Ken Sutherland and Clara Granzotto analyzed the surface materials and detected the presence of natural resins, including bleached shellac, and an acrylic resin, as well as a protein-based material, likely glue from an early conservation treatment. The combination of materials identified suggested that the painting had been partially or unevenly cleaned in the past with new varnish added on top of older layers. This accumulation resulted in a considerably thick layer that gave the painting the character of a laminated placemat! And because Whistler chose an open-weave canvas, accumulations of varnish and glue had settled into the recesses. Over time, these deposits yellowed and developed micro-cracks, creating light speckles, which were particularly disturbing in the water.
Accumulations of old varnish in the recesses of the surface texture of Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea (photomicrograph)
Cleaning tests performed along the edges of the painting offered an exciting preview of Whistler’s true colors and the dramatic impact that cleaning would have, encouraging us to move forward with the treatment.
A small cleaning test at the edge of the painting
Gradually, layers of discolored varnish and dirt were removed using various solvent mixtures and hand-rolled cotton swabs.
Using cotton swabs and solvents, conservator Kim Muir removes the old varnish from Whistler’s canvas.
We met regularly throughout the treatment to assess the progress. As the painting was freed from decades of discolored varnish and dirt, the nuanced color harmonies Whistler was famous for began to materialize: the water emerged as a pool of rich greenish-blue and the cool silver and violet tones that inspired the painting’s title reappeared.
Mid-treatment image of Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea (detail), 1893
A sea change indeed! The painting’s surface qualities also came to life, as the treatment uncovered Whistler’s economical brushwork and subtle variations in paint consistency. Smooth brushstrokes and touches of low impasto in the clouds and cresting waves now play against broad areas of heavily thinned paint that barely coats the canvas.
As he worked, Whistler lightly wiped or abraded the paint surface, exposing the red ground layer he had used to prime his canvas; this is especially apparent where the warm red hue peeks through the blue tones of the sky.
As a final step in the treatment, a layer of varnish was applied. This is in keeping with Whistler’s well-documented opinions about the presentation of his paintings. Though many of his contemporaries favored unvarnished paint surfaces at this stage, Whistler preferred his paintings be cleaned and varnished regularly. In 1894, shortly after he had finished Violet and Silver, Whistler sent it to his restorer, Stephen Richards, to be varnished in preparation for an exhibition. He advised Richards to give it “a beautiful coat of varnish—not too thick—but you know what pleases me—so that the surface shall be perfect.” How we approached this in 2025 was to apply a thin layer of a stable synthetic varnish to give the painting an even sheen and saturation. The varnish will not yellow and will remain easily removable should the painting need to be treated again in the future.
While years of experience and practice allow us to predict, to a certain extent, the outcome of a treatment, even we were surprised by this dramatic transformation, which completely changed our perception of the work.
See for yourself—drag the slider to the right to see the before-treatment image and to the left to reveal the after-treatment image.
The space within the composition opened up and, instead of feeling flat and two dimensional, there was a palpable sense of depth and of clouds rolling in on the distant horizon. With its color harmonies and surface texture restored, Violet and Silver—The Deep Sea comes much closer to the painting Whistler intended.
—Kimberley Muir, research conservator for paintings, Conservation and Science, and Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Curator, Arts of the Americas
notes
Whistler to Stephen Richards, January 9, 1894, no. 10719 in The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855–1903, ed. Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort, and Nigel Thorp, online edition (Glasgow, UK: University of Glasgow, 2003–10): https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/recno/display/?cid=10719&recno=y&Submit3=Run+Query)
Learn more about Whistler artworks in the Art Institute collection: