Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea is one of the earliest night landscapes James McNeill Whistler painted along the Thames in London, around 1871. It marks the start of a series of fifty-two nocturnes, a name the painter adopted on the suggestion of Frederick Richards Leyland, and it opens a London trilogy completed by two later works. Whistler conceived it on the same August evening as Variations in Violet and Green, and the two were shown together at the Dudley Gallery. His working method was unusual: he studied the scene at night, described it from memory to someone beside him, slept, and painted it the next morning. The colour went on in thin, luminous layers, sometimes over paint still wet, using a medium so fluid that the canvas was reportedly laid flat to keep the image from sliding. The flattened, silhouetted shapes and near-monochrome tones recall Japanese ukiyo-e prints and sumi-e ink painting, and Whistler signed with a stylised butterfly that mimicked a seal. The picture is a key example of both Tonalism and his engagement with Japonisme.

Painter

James McNeill Whistler

Date

1871

Medium

oil paint, panel

Dimensions

50 × 61 cm

Museum

Tate, London

Movement

Tonalism

Genre

landscape painting

Depicts

Battersea, barge, fisher, Chelsea Old Church, Chelsea

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