Provenance
George Alfred Lathrop [1819-1877] by 1866; purchased by 1867 by Thomas DeKay Winans [1820-1878], Baltimore;[1] his daughter, Celeste Winans [Mrs. G. M.] Hutton, Baltimore, until at least 1923; Flora MacDonald White, New York; sold 29 September 1928 to John Hay Whitney [1904-1982], Manhasset, New York;[2] deeded 1982 to the John Hay Whitney Charitable Trust, New York; gift 1982 to NGA.
[1] For an extended discussion of the painting's provenance, see Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, _James McNeill Whistler: The paintings, a catalogue raisonné_, University of Glasgow, 2020, website at http://whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk, no. 35. Based on a letter of 25 April 1864 from William Bell Scott to James Leathart, Gordon Fleming, _The Young Whistler_ (London, 1978:196), indicated that Whistler had sold the painting to Winans in 1864. However, the painting was lent to the 1866 Artists' Fund Society exhibition by Dr. George A. Lathrop. According to an unidentified newspaper clipping in the Winans-Hutton Family Scrapbook, ms. 916, box 18, Maryland Historical Society Manuscripts Division, Winans purchased _Wapping_ in 1867 when it was exhibited at the Universal Exhibition in Paris (according to the same source Whistler "wanted it for exhibition at Goupil's, in 1892, but could not get it and it has not been seen in Europe since 1867.") Elizabeth Robins Pennell and Joseph Pennell, _The Life of James McNeill Whistler_ (2 vols., London, 1908: I:88), indicated that Winans brought the painting to Baltimore shortly after the 1867 Paris exhibition. Winans had accompanied the artist's father Major George Washington Whistler to Russia in 1844, where they began construction on a railroad line between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Winans became wealthy through the venture, and shortly after returning to Baltimore in 1851 built "Alexandroffsky." Whistler had briefly worked for the Winans Locomotive Company at Baltimore in 1854, after his discharge from West Point. His elder half-brother George Whistler married into the Winans family. For biographical information on Winans see Bertram Lippincott III, "The Hutton Family of 'Shamrock Cliff'," _Newport History. Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society_ 64, no. 221 (Fall 1991): 164-166; and Alexandra Lee Levin, "Inventive, Imaginative, and Incorrigible: The Winans Family and the Building of the First Russian Railroad," _Maryland Historical Magazine_ 84 (Spring 1989): 50-55.
[2] Whitney's 1928 purchase from White is according to records from the John Hay Whitney Foundation (now kept at Yale University Library). See summary of information in NGA curatorial records.
Accession Number
1982.76.8
Medium
oil on canvas
Dimensions
overall: 72 x 101.8 cm (28 3/8 x 40 1/16 in.) | framed: 92.1 x 123.5 x 7.6 cm (36 1/4 x 48 5/8 x 3 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
John Hay Whitney Collection
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting Canvas American
Background & Context
Background Story
Orange and Yellow, painted in 1956, belongs to Mark Rothko's classic period: the large-scale canvases of hovering rectangular fields that define his contribution to Abstract Expressionism. Two luminous rectangles - a band of orange floating above yellow - hover against a ground of warm amber, their edges dissolving in the soft-focus effect achieved through thin washes of pigment.
Rothko insisted his paintings were about basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom. He wanted them to function like icons - objects of contemplation producing religious awe. He specified they should be hung low, in dim light, close enough that the canvas edges exceed the field of vision.
Orange and Yellow belongs to his most productive period. The warm, radiant colors create an effect of luminous presence emanating from the canvas. Yet Rothko's characteristic melancholy persists: the rectangle edges dissolve, as though the form is aware of its own impermanence.
Cultural Impact
Rothko's color-field paintings established abstraction as a vehicle for the most profound emotional experience. His demonstration that two rectangles of color could produce feelings of tragedy and ecstasy transformed the understanding of what art could do.
Why It Matters
Orange and Yellow captures Rothko's fundamental paradox: a painting of radical simplicity producing radical complexity. Two rectangles are both everything and nothing - a sunset, an altar, a void, and a presence.
