Whistler: Thames River

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1860
Oil on canvas
H x W: 74.6 x 55.3 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1901.107a-b

This painting, originally entitled The Twenty-fifth of December, 1860, On the Thames, records a particular moment during a bitterly cold winter, when the Thames was frozen for more than fourteen weeks. Although he likely retouched the work later in the decade, Whistler claimed to have completed it in three days of work at an inn overlooking the river. The bold brushstrokes, somber palette, and thinly painted surface reinforce the realistic immediacy of the image.

This prosaic portrait of a working river seems to be worlds away from the nearly abstract visual poetry of Whistler's later Nocturnes (F1909.127, F1902.97), but there is a hint of his later style in the misty grey atmosphere that envelopes the factories on the opposite bank.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1870-1875
Oil on canvas
H x W: 49.9 x 72.3 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.97a-b

From the time he moved to London in 1859, Whistler always lived within sight of the Thames River, finding it a constant source of inspiration for his art. It was a luminous twilight view of the River in the summer of 1871 that led Whistler to produce thirty-two paintings known as "Nocturnes." These ephemeral images of urban darkness would become his most original contribution to nineteenth-century painting.

This work depicts the view toward Battersea that Whistler would have seen from his second-story studio in Chelsea. Battersea was an industrial area of London, full of factories, slag heaps, and smog, and Whistler's interest in the urban scene hints at his ties to the French Realist movement earlier in his career. By the 1870s, however, Whistler had embraced and synthesized a new artistic influence and formal vocabulary: the compositional principles and flattened forms of Japanese prints. Here, he combined these elements—evident in the gracefully asymmetrical arrangement of masts, planar bands of color, and nearly monochromatic palette—with the evocative quality of moonlight to impart a poetic, mysterious beauty to the industrial river view. Victorian viewers, accustomed to clearly rendered visual narratives, found the Nocturnes perplexing. But Charles Lang Freer appreciated what he described as their "refinement and mystery." He eagerly sought out eight examples and regarded this painting, which he purchased in 1902, as "one of the four greatest masterpieces of the Nocturnes."

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1871-72
Oil on canvas
H x W: 62.7 x 40.5 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.249a-b

After Whistler moved from Paris to London in 1859, he found the Thames to be a constant source of inspiration. He spent many hours on the river, gathering impressions that were later recorded on canvas his second-story studio in Chelsea, which itself afforded a view of the river and its distinctly modern, industrial environs.

In 1872, when Whistler painted Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea, his view included the construction of the Chelsea Embankment, a major public works project designed to reclaim land around the Thames and that included the construction of massive walls and landing stages along the river bank. Here, the artist has incorporated construction fences and even the new saplings that were part of the urban planning project. Even so, Whistler has overlaid the scene with deliberate artifice, using the flattened forms, bird's-eye perspective, and asymmetrical compositional principles of Japanese prints to create a decorative, rather than a realistic, image. By placing his signature butterfly on the frame (which Whistler designed specifically for this painting) as well as on the canvas itself, he calls attention to the framed, artful nature of the image.