James Abbott McNeill Whistler

“My whole scheme was only to bring about a certain harmony of colour”.

By Chistopher Volpe

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Along with George Inness, James Abbott McNeill Whistler is the most important innovator of the tonalist mode. Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, though he conducted his career as an expat, first in Paris then in the UK.

Whistler conceived of his paintings in musical terms, essentially as tonal harmonies, that is harmonies of color (or perhaps more properly color-values, i.e. tones, which of course, like harmony, is a musical term). Boldly privileging color, shape, and value (rather than content), Whistler exemplified the 19th century art-for-art’s-sake approach of the British Aesthetic movement. Sophisticated, cosmopolitan and thoroughly modern, the Aesthetic credo banished centuries of Western sentimentalism and moralizing (via content). Visual art, music, and literature were seen for the first time as purely aesthetic phenomena, beautiful and worthy in their own right, thanks primarily to their formal qualities alone. Whistler wrote:

“As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color. Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear …. and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

This meant Whistler’s pictures would work on the viewer like Japanese prints or the music of Chopin – without saying anything definite in particular. Of his quite varied output, it’s the artist’s nocturnes, a term borrowed directly from Chopin, that relate most clearly to American Tonalism. In terms of technique, Whistler’s misty dusks and moonlit waterways, painted in the 1870s, already demonstrate all the technical hallmarks of peak American Tonalism. These include a narrow range of muted colors, diffused light and softened, indistinct forms, free and expressive paint handling, glazing (an important tool in the later Inness’s studio), and composition and design inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, which Western artists were seeing en mass for the first time. 

Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach - James Abbott McNeill Whistler

A close examination of Whistler’s Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach, painted between 1872-1878, reveals that the artist “brushed thinned pigment across the canvas in bold, sweeping strokes, modulating the tone of the blue only slightly to create the subtle gradations that separate river, shore, and sky. Specks of orange and yellow mark the position of boats on the water, lights on the shore, and a clock tower in the distance.” The atmosphere on the Thames is so thick that the city’s lights seem like dying embers barely capable of registering as luminous. The picture admirably answers Whistler’s prescription that painting be “like breath on glass.” In effect, Whistler suspends time and place as he merges elements one into another: the foreground and middle ground boaters, so vaguely painted as to be barely there, the indeterminate spires and rooftops reflected in the river below and diffusing into the fog above, the city a permeable, shadowy mass dissolving in water and air.  

Nocturne in Silver and Grey - James Abbott McNeil Whistler

Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Falling Rocket - James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Water, sky, and shore similarly intermingle in Whistler’s famous Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Falling Rocket, a poetic rendering of fireworks drifting down the night sky like a fountain of gently falling stars. When this painting appeared in 1875 alongside the first exhibited works of the precise, draftsman-like work of the Pre-Raphaelites, eminent critic John Ruskin, taken with the specific literary references, clean lines, and clarity of the likes of Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Edward Byrne-Jones, accused Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As in the Battersea Reach nocturne, Whistler deliberately suspends sky, earth, air, and water in an otherworldly harmony achieved by carefully modulating color-tones. He is not after what the eye or the camera sees; he is after the music of sensation.

Though Whistler might protest, one could argue that the effect of the nocturnes, intended or not, is the quasi-religious exaltation, in secular, elegant terms, of quiet moments of modern life. For, just as the American Tonalists favored the “civilized landscape” of ordinary fields, streams, barns, and clumps of trees transformed by mystery and hints of the divine, Whistler in his nocturnes painted the city’s industrial forms and skylines softened and “harmonized” by the natural elements of water, sky, moonlight, night, and fog – and here is a major source of their poetry. 

Nocturne, 1870-1877 - James Abbott McNeil Whistler

Whistler’s reputation in England never recovered from his disastrous lawsuit with Ruskin. But his  outsider status led him to an unfashionable fascination with older academic values such as those of Rembrandt, El Greco, and Velasquez. From them he learned the value of painterly craftsmanship and handling exquisitely suited to theme. He revived and extended the practice of beginning a painting with a warm undertone to be offset by cool overtones placed on top, a common strategy in 20th and 21st century painting. Allowing the undertone to bleed through or leaving them exposed in areas throughout is thought to harmonize the picture and create a rich unity of effect. And although the older masters, such as Velasquez and Turner, did something like this, no one exploited the technique like Whistler. Birge Harrison in his influential book on landscape painting describes these very techniques, naming them “vibration” and “diffraction,” as the principle technical contributions to painting of his generation.

Nocturne Blue and Gold Southampton Water, James Abbott McNeil Whistler

In fact, America in general celebrated Whistler as much for his innovative talent as for his independent, rebellious persona. Whistler was the first American to make major waves on the world’s art stage. He waged a one-man avant-garde assault on London’s Royal Academy comparable to the American revolution being led by George Inness, John La Farge, Albert Pinkham Ryder and William Morris Hunt in the New York art world of the 1860s, ‘70s, and ‘80s that today is known as American Tonalism.