Jump to content

Talk:Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Good articleSymphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl has been listed as one of the Art and architecture good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
July 2, 2010Good article nomineeListed
Did You Know
A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on February 1, 2010.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that of James Whistler's paintings Symphony in White, No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3, only the latter (pictured) carried that name originally?

GA Review

[edit]
This review is transcluded from Talk:Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: BencherliteTalk 17:39, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

Very interesting stuff. I'm making some minor copyedits as I go along, but if you think that they don't make it better, feel free to undo them. Some questions / thoughts:

  1. The article title: the article says that it was called "Symphony in White, No 1" or "The White Girl" - do the sources tend to refer to it in the way that you have, with both elements together? I can get to some of them online, but not all of them. MacDonald in Grove Art Online, for example, uses the compound title, but Spencer in the ODNB doesn't.
    • There is some discrepancy in the naming, but the NGA uses this form, and I guess they should be considered the authority (which reminds me I should put in an external link to the museum). For this reason, and simply to avoid confusion, I think this is the best form to use.
  2. Would it be worth adding a few words about the Royal Academy and the Salon, so that the reader doesn't have to leave the article to get the sense of why Whistler would want the picture shown there?
    • Done.
  3. MacDonald in Grove Art Online says Paul Mantz, in the Gazette des Beaux Arts, called it a "Symphonie du blanc" - worth mentioning that it wasn't Whistler's idea initially, at least? (I assume that this isn't Wikipedia's Paul Mantz?!)
    • Good point, I added that. And no, it wasn't some guy who wasn't born yet:) He doesn't seem to be all that notable, so I simply refer to him as a critic.
  4. Spencer in ODNB says that a private gallery exhibited it under the title The Woman in White, leading to complaints that it didn't resemble Collins's heroine - worth mentioning? If so, do we know which gallery and when?
    • I added this too, and this must have been the Berners Street Gallery exhibition mentioned earlier in the article.
  5. Do we know when and how the painting was acquired by the National Gallery in Washington, or the chain of ownership before that?
    • Added a quick summary from the museum home page.
  6. Should the article be added to one or more of the sub-categories of Category:Portraits?

That's all I can think of for now. Let me know what you think of these points. Can't see there being too many problems to GA status after that. I suppose I ought to put an  On hold flag for tradition's sake... BencherliteTalk 18:04, 30 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for a thorough review and a good copy-edit. Lampman (talk) 00:55, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Excellent. It's a clear pass, well done. BencherliteTalk 08:15, 2 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]