Whistler: Musical Titles

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, ca. 1868
Oil on millboard mounted on wood panel
H x W: 46.4 x 61.6 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.138a-b

The White Symphony: The Three Girls is one of the so-called Six Projects, a never-completed decorative sequence dedicated to the theme of beauty. The precise narrative depicted is unclear, and Whistler's choice of a musical title suggests that he hoped to direct viewers to focus on the formal interplay of colors rather than on a particular story. The vivid palette and freely painted surfaces of the Projects charmed the poet Algernon Swinburne, who saw them in Whistler's studio in 1868 and said, "They all give the direct delight of natural things; they seem to have grown as a flower grows, not in any forcing house of ingenious and elaborate cunning."

This painting, like all the Six Projects, was actually the result of highly deliberate experimentation, undertaken when Whistler was exploring a range of sources and seeking a distinctive artistic style. By borrowing freely from Japanese prints, classical Greek sculpture, Rococo painting, and the neoclassicism of his own time, Whistler hoped to liberate his art from the chains of narrative realism and Victorian morality.

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834-1903)
United States, 1866/ ca.1874
Oil on canvas
H x W: 76.4 x 50.7 cm
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1909.127a-b

Whistler began this painting in 1866 on a trip to Chile, where he watched the Spanish navy attack the harbor at Valparaiso. This is one of a series of works done during the trip, an episode of Whistler's biography that remains somewhat mysterious. This painting was originally conceived as a daylight scene, and its asymmetrical composition and flattened forms show the influence of Japanese prints. Whistler returned to the painting in the 1870s, and it was probably then that he transformed it into a Nocturne and gave it the present title. Whistler had called his earliest images of urban darkness "Moonlights." But when his patron, Frederic Richards Leyland, suggested the musical term "Nocturnes," Whistler was delighted: "I can't thank you too much for the name "Nocturne," he wrote. "You have no idea what an irritation it proves to the critics and consequent pleasure to me—besides it is really so charming and does so poetically say all I want to say and no more than I wish!"