About this work
The figure at the centre of this painting is Joanna Hiffernan — Whistler's model, muse, and companion — seated in a relaxed, diagonal pose and dressed in a richly embroidered Chinese brocade robe over a dark underlayer.
The embroidered patterns on her robe are traditional Chinese symbols: elaborate arabesques of butterflies in rich colours alternate with bright leaves and pale flowers — peonies, chrysanthemums, and buds — worked onto cream silk.
She holds a brush raised in her right hand as though mid-stroke, her hair pulled back in a Chinese court style, while around her are arranged objects from Whistler's personal collection — a teacup, a ginger jar, a lacquer tray, a fan bearing a crane, and Chinese brushes behind her.
The background is kept to warm beige and brown tones, allowing the figure's robe and the blue-and-white porcelain to assert themselves with full chromatic force. The title's palette — purple and rose — maps precisely onto the layered costume, while the cool white-and-cobalt of the ceramics provides a counterpoint that holds the composition in careful tension.
Whistler's work was given new direction as Japanese goods flooded into the West following Commodore Perry's arrival in Japan in 1855. By 1863, he was avidly combing the junk-shops of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Paris for oriental artefacts, and by December he had started this, his first oriental subject painting.
It is the first of several specifically Asian subjects, a sequence that would include *La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine*, *Variations in Flesh Colour and Green: The Balcony*, and *Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen*.
The painting was completed and shown at the 96th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1864.
The "Six Marks" of the title were the potter's marks giving signature and date on the bottom of the vases — one of Whistler's own *lange lijzen* jars of the K'ang Hs'i Dynasty (1662–1722) appears in the painting itself, and the Six Marks decorate the roundels on the frame he designed for it. Even the frame was conceived as part of the total aesthetic object — its six roundels, placed at each corner and at the left and right midpoints, are each incised with a different Chinese character resembling the marks found on the underside of blue-and-white porcelain, indicating the reign during which a piece was made.
This is a painting that rewards a considered room: it suits walls that have depth and quiet — a study, a dining room with warm
