Sea and Rain

Sea and Rain shows a lone figure standing at the edge of the surf, where waves break into a barely visible foam beneath an overcast, misty sky. Whistler handles the scene with soft brushwork and thin layers of paint, so that sea, air and rain merge into a single range of muted tones. The palette is deliberately restricted: it is said to use only four pigments (cobalt blue, iron-oxide yellow, vermilion and bone black), a economy that foreshadows the nocturnes he would paint a decade later. The work was made in the autumn of 1865 in Trouville-sur-Mer, a fishing village and seaside resort on the Normandy coast, where Whistler worked alongside the realist painter Gustave Courbet, and his partner Joanna Hiffernan travelled with him. By then Whistler was already moving away from Courbet's realism, and his tonal sensibility is, it is generally said, rooted in Japanese aesthetics. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1867, where critics received it favourably, and it is closely related to another of his seascapes from the same year, Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville.

Painter

James McNeill Whistler

Date

1865

Medium

oil paint, canvas

Dimensions

53 × 73 cm

Museum

University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor

Genre

marine art

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