A Spiteful Eruption in Green and Gold: James McNeill Whistler’s The Gold Scab as an Anti-Portrait

In 1879, James McNeill Whistler created The Gold Scab, a painting depicting Frederick R. Leyland, his former friend and patron, as an anthropomorphized peacock sitting atop a white house in front of a piano covered with bags of gold. The Gold Scab has been described as a self-portrait, a satirical portrait, a “Japanese grotesquerie,” and a monumental caricature. Regardless of what one categorizes it as, the work is an unsatisfactory misfit that deviates from the conventions of these genres. By analyzing how The Gold Scab borrows from the genres of portraiture and caricature yet deviates from the conventions and intentions of these genres, this paper situates The Gold Scab within a larger movement, away from the rigidity of the genre of nineteenth-century portraiture. In my examination of The Gold Scab through the lens of anti-portraiture, a framework that deprioritizes likeness as the defining convention of portraiture and instead prioritizes consideration of the artist’s intentions, it becomes clear that The Gold Scab is not a misfit; rather, it serves as a more than satisfactory example of the shift in the ideological discourse regarding likeness and portraiture taking place in the nineteenth century.