James Abbott McNeill Whistler

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was an abrasive exhibitionist American, who arrived in London in 1859 from Paris. His propensity for entitling his portraits 'arrangements' and his river and seascapes 'nocturnes' and 'symphonies' reflected his attitude that pictures need not have any specific 'subject' and were essentially arrangements of line and form. With Albert Moore he formed the theory of 'art for art's sake', laying the cornerstone to that monument of elitism which fine art would rapidly become as a result of this idea: an impenetrable game, played out beyond the reach - or interest - of laypeople who were no longer initiated into its language or conventions.

Whistler's effect on landscape painting was decisive, although he was not a landscape artist. When he did not paint portraits he chose tidal rivers, coasts and the sea, while living an urban life. He maintained that to create harmony an artist must discriminate and arrange, and he rejected any belief that it was the mission of the artist to copy nature. Towards the end of the 1860s, Whistler began to reject Realism for Aestheticism. He was still painting modern landscapes, but now chose to veil the ugliness of industrial London by painting it at night. He prepared for these pictures by going out in a boat on the Thames after dark, committing the scenes to memory so that he could work on his paintings back in his studio.

Whistler called these revolutionary works 'Nocturnes', deliberately comparing their lack of narrative content to music. Their compositions are startlingly simple, the colours reduced to a few delicate tonal harmonies. He produced them using paint so thin it was as translucent as watercolour. He owed much to his enthusiasm for Chinese and Japanese painting, and it brought him into direct conflict with Ruskin who, viewing Whistler's 'Nocturnes' (twilight studies of the Thames river) in 1879, accused him of 'throwing a pot of paint in the public's face'!

Most Victorian viewers were scandalised by their absence of subject matter and lack of finish. John Ruskin attacked them in print, prompting Whistler to sue him for libel and leading to a celebrated court case.

		JM Whistler Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket 1875

Society in Victorian Art

 

Derby Day by William Powell Frith, RA. [Original 1858 in Tate Gallery, London] Signed and dated 1893-94. 102.3 x 234.4 cm. City Art Galleries, Manchester. According to the museum site, "This version replicates a Royal Academy exhibit of 1858. It was commissioned by James Gresham of Stretford and was thought by Frith to be better than his original." The museum's entry further explains:

Derby Day was an established day out by the 1850s. The crowds of thousands came from all social classes for the colourful entertainments as much as the race. Frith's first visit to Epsom Downs was in 1856, when he was taken in by a thimble-rigging gang. A team of these con-men can be seen on the left. The Victorians were fascinated by phrenology, the reflection of social types in facial characteristics. This partly accounts for the success of and other crowd scenes by Frith and his followers.

In 1855, Victorian artists had the opportunity to be judged against their European counterparts at the Paris International Exhibition. British painting though not found to compete with the elevated characters of French works, was admired for its originality, eccentric humor and love of detail in the genre and narrative paintings.

Domestic genre, rustic subjects and literary and historical anecdotes continued to flourish in mid-Victorian Britain, but from the early 50s, a new element entered narrative and genre painting. Many of the artists now began to paint the contemporary urban middle-class milieu with a naive delight in the up-to-date: omnibuses and railway stations, opera boxes and parlormaids, and scenes from life and from modern literature.

The move to paint contemporary life was part of a wider repositioning of European taste. Baudelaire, in his Paris salon reviews of the mid 40s had called for artists to represent the heroism of modern life, its 'neck ties and patent leather boots', and the 'thousand existences' which formed the 'floating life of a great city'. British painters, while remaining conservative in their attitude to narrative, detail and composition, anticipated in the 50s and early 60s, the subject that would be taken up by the Impressionists in the 70s and 80s: the races, the opera, the urban middle classes at leisure in parks, on beaches and city streets.

Paintings on urban life by William Powell Frith were among the most popular of British depiction of contemporary social life. Frith's pictures, for all their novelettish concentration on surface rather than inner moral complexities, have something of the richness of Dickens' novels with their interweaving of plot and subplot, and their mixture of characters from different social worlds.