This work is a study for a never-completed painting called The Three Girls that was intended to hang opposite The Princess from the Land of Porcelain in the Peacock Room, which was originally a dining room in the home of Whistler’s patron, Frederick Richards Leyland. Whistler envisioned the painting as the fourth of his “White Symphonies.” It was undertaken when he was exploring a range of artistic sources and seeking a distinctive signature style. By borrowing freely from Japanese prints, classical Greek sculpture, eighteenth-century Rococo painting, and the neoclassicism of his own time, Whistler hoped to liberate his art from the chains of narrative realism and Victorian morality.

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　This study for The Three Girls represents the early, optimistic stage of Whistler’s work on the painting that Leyland commissioned. It may be the “final oil sketch” he mentioned in a letter late in 1867, when the artist assured his patron that the work was “getting on.” Whistler painted The White Symphony on millboard, a coarsely textured, inexpensive support appropriate for creating a rough draft of the composition. In addition to a wide brush, he apparently used a palette knife for the blossoms and his fingers for the forms of the faces.

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