Works by James McNeill Whistler
400 works · 209 ms
James McNeill Whistler gave many of his paintings musical titles, nocturnes, symphonies, harmonies, to put tone and composition before story; prints come first among the works below, then paintings and drawings.
In Paris Charles Gleyre taught him that line matters more than colour and that black is the base of tonal harmony, and Whistler kept to both. His etching Reading by Lamplight, of 1858, fills the wall behind a reader with dense cross-hatching and keeps the lamplight pale.
In the mid-1860s he posed Western models in Asian dress among Chinese and Japanese objects he owned. In Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen, of 1864, Joanna Hiffernan sits on the floor before a gold screen, a Hiroshige print in her hands and more spread at her feet. Variations in Flesh Colour and Green - The Balcony takes such figures out onto a balcony over the Thames, with factory chimneys across the water and a red butterfly on a pale panel at lower left in place of his name.
A trip to Valparaíso in 1866 gave him his first night pieces, called moonlights until he took up the word nocturne. Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket, of 1875, is fireworks at Cremorne Gardens: gold sparks drift through green-black smoke over dim figures. After John Ruskin condemned it, Whistler sued and won a farthing; the case's cost and debts from building his house bankrupted him by May 1879. Twelve commissioned etchings kept him fourteen months in Venice, and he made over 100 pastels there, such as Venice: Sunset on Harbour, the city a dark band under an orange sky.
Sources: Wikipedia, Smithsonian Institution, Detroit Institute of Arts.
