Bibi Lalouette
circa 1859
The girl's
imaginative trance dictated to Whistler how her portrait was to be etched. She
is as thoughtful and as chubby-cheeked as one of Robert Louis Stevenson's
anonymous children for whom he wrote his short fantastical poems (especially
those illustrated by Charles Robinson), each bearing a cadence of childhood
that anyone can recognise.
For Whistler, Bibi assumes a charm that is
unspoken: she does not look or awknowledge him, but casts her eyes downwards.
She is like François-Louis David Bocion's Célestine (see post for 19 May 2013) in that she lives in another world, perhaps one of
her own creation, in which she forgets her understanding of time and space and
seems to float on a surreal cloud of thoughts. Clothed in a heavy night gown,
Bibi's head and hands are the only parts of her body which remain grounded in
reality, while the rest of her falls into the thick swathe of lines making up
the thing on which she sits and the gown in which she is wrapped. Her hair is
tossled; what seems like a lidded box sits next to her, opened. Is she a child
dreaming of unlocking treasure troves and discovering places unknown, or -
given that this drawing is more than a century old - is she now living that dream?
