CINCINNATI, OH.-The painting At the Piano by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, part of the Taft Museum of Art's permanent collection, will be included in a major exhibition at the Louvre, in Paris, from June 14 through September 18, 2006. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art and the Musée du Louvre. The last day to view At the Piano at the Taft Museum will be Sunday, May 21, 2006. The painting will be back in the fall, following the exhibition in Paris.

The painting will be part of the exhibition American Artists and the Louvre, which explores the relationship between American and French art from 1770 through 1930. Throughout that period, many American artists traveled to Paris to study art, often at the Louvre Museum itself. There they engaged in dialogues with French art of the past and with contemporary French painters.

The Whistler in the Taft Museum of Art's collection is a key element in this exchange, since the artist painted At the Piano after a period of three years of study in Paris, where he studied and copied art at the Louvre. While there, he met and was deeply influenced by the French realist Gustave Courbet. A decade later, he also became friendly with Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet. Whistler was a key player in avant-garde art in the middle and late 19th century, and a major conduit for transmission of artistic ideas among America, England, and France.

"At the Piano, which is widely acknowledged to be Whistler's first masterpiece, fuses autobiography, traditional Dutch scenes of daily life, and the radical art movement called 'Réalisme' into one compelling image that holds the eye with its powerful color contrasts and intriguingly flattened composition," said Lynne Ambrosini, chief curator, Taft Museum of Art.

At the Piano is both an intimate domestic study and a portrait of the artist's family. Whistler's half sister, Deborah Delano Haden, plays the piano while her daughter, Annie Harriet Haden, listens. Deborah was the daughter of Whistler's father by his first wife. In 1860 Whistler successfully exhibited At the Piano at the Royal Academy; it was his first work shown publicly in England and was bought by the painter John Phillip.

The Taft painting foreshadowed Whistler's mature and influential paintings of the 1870s. The austerity, unique color harmony, and rectilinear design are the most precocious features of At the Piano. The unsentimental character of the scene is also significant, since such an undemonstrative portrayal of home life is contrary to most English genre paintings of the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The subject matter of At the Piano may be borrowed from Dutch pictures, but it also looks forward to Whistler's later interest in allying art with music. Beginning in the 1870s, he gave musical titles to his paintings, likening the abstraction of the art of sound to the purported abstraction of his pictures. Yet the piano in the Taft painting functions primarily as a sign of domestic intimacy, focal point for the family, and a psychological link between mother and daughter, player and listener.

Among the approximately sixty works in the American Artists and the Louvre exhibition-which will comprise paintings by such artists as Benjamin West, John Vanderlyn, Thomas Cole, Thomas Eakins, James Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Maurice Prendergast, and Thomas Hart Benton-will be a group of seminal paintings on loan from the Terra Foundation's distinguished collection. Other works, like Whistler's At the Piano, will be on loan from national and international collections.

Louvre President and Director Henri Loyrette remarked, "The Louvre's primary programming partners are American museums, and most of our international visitors are U.S. citizens, accounting for twenty percent of our annual attendance. We are now eager to broaden our already deep ties with American arts organizations to include a more diverse group of institutions. We look forward to an especially fruitful partnership with the Terra Foundation."