PBS Whistler documentary features Taft painting

• On the Air%3A Friday%2C Sept. 12%2C 9-10 p.m.%2C WCET%2C Channel 48.

A painting belonging to the Taft Museum of Art is part of a new documentary about the artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

The hour-long documentary, "James McNeill Whistler & The Case for Beauty," premieres on PBS (locally, WCET) at 9 p.m. Friday, Sept. 12.

Award-winning filmmaker Karen Thomas directs, Anjelica Houston narrates, and Kevin Kline is the voice of Whistler (1834-1903).

The Taft painting "At the Piano," oil on canvas, painted in London in 1858-59, is considered Whistler's first major work. ("Arrangement in Black and White No. 1," better known as "Whistler's Mother," was painted in 1871.)

Here is a description of the painting provided by the Taft:

"The 'Piano Picture,' as the artist called this study of his half-sister and niece, is world-renowned as Whistler's first masterpiece. This experiment in composition and color is held together by a grid of picture frames, moldings, and furniture. With its space curving inward at the edges, two parallel centers are created in the black-robed woman concentrating on her playing while her white-clad daughter gazes outward. An advocate of 'art for art's sake,' Whistler relieved the suggestion of confinement by emphasizing reflections in the glass of the pictures as well as on the piano legs and instrument case."

Taft chief curator Lynne Ambrosini described to the Enquirer via e-mail how the Taft came to acquire the painting in 1962: "The painting was purchased directly from the artist by John Phillip (1860-67), a Victorian artist in London. Upon his death, Seymour Haden, Whistler's brother-in-law and a noted printmaker, acquired it; it represented his wife and daughter. It went into a Scottish collection in 1897-99, then to an English aristocratic collection in 1899-39. Louise Taft Semple and her husband, William T. Semple, acquired it from a dealer in New York in 1940 and left it to the Taft Museum of Art as a bequest in 1962."