WHISTLER, James Abbot McNeill

In 1875 Whistler painted a firework display in the Cremorne Gardens in London. Exhibited in London in 118175 with the explanatory words The Falling Rocket, and then again in 1877 without that tag, the painting was to incur the criticism of Ruskin, the champion of the Pre-Raphaelites. Whistler brought against Ruskin a trial of the action in 1878.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 18 minutes):

Handel: Fireworks Music

Whistler, the friend of Monet and Renoir, was instrumental in communicating Impressionism to Britain. His nocturnes of the early 1870s were pioneering work contemporaneous with Monet’s breakthrough. In them, Whistler viewed the Thames at night in muted, poetic harmonies of hue. What counted was not a precise detail or outline; rather, Whistler was after large, simple, major form. The foreground, middle distance and background were treated in much the same way, conventional perspective was meaningless. The influence of Japanese art is palpable.

Whistler painted this famous picture in the summer of 1871 in London. It represents the 67-year-old Anna Mathilda Whistler, the artist’s mother. She is shown in profile, seated on a chair, incorporated formally within a rigid system of verticals and horizontals provided by the floorboards, curtain, chair-back, footstool, and pictures on the wall. The woman, dressed in black and wearing a white bonnet, stands out clearly against the gray wall; form and colour thereby subordinate to the overall design of the picture

This portrait stands at the beginning of Whistler’s successful career as a portrait painter, and already contains all the characteristics of his subsequent works.

Whistler regarded painting as simply an exercise in colour variations - to the point where he gave his compositions titles that evoke only the dominant colour notes. Whistler originally dated The Balcony 1865, before replacing the traditional signature with a rectangular cartouche featuring a butterfly (a kind of naturalistic stylisation of his own initials), the cartouche idea being very obviously borrowed from those used by Japanese printmakers. Whistler was in fact one of the earliest enthusiasts of Japanese art.

In The Balcony, Whistler turned the view from his balcony overlooking the River Thames into a sort of Japanese fairy tale by placing several young women dressed in Japanese costume in poses directly inspired by those found in the prints of Utagawa Kunisada and Katsushika Hokusai, almost contemporary Japanese artists whose works were the first to reach the West.