The Artist's Road Painting the World's Beautiful Places

   The Nature of Painting
Perspectives from The Artist's Road


Nocturne in Black and Gold - The Falling Rocket   

J. A. M. Whistler

   We have been reading Marc Simpson’s 2008 book, Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Clark Art Institute. It has provoked some lively studio discussions about the late work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Dissatisfied with what he had learned from his teacher, Gustave Courbet, Whistler set out in 1867 to unlearn all he knew about painting and set himself on a new path of experimentation. In a letter to his friend Henri Fantin-Latour, he wrote, "That damned Realism made an immediate appeal to my vanity as a painter! . . .and then people went to see it! . . . canvases produced by a nobody puffed up with pride at showing off his splendid gifts to other painters . . ."

   Simpson writes, “For over three years Whistler worked on creating a radical painting manner that integrated color, line, principles of Japanese and ancient Greek art, and the virtues he admired among his contemporaries in the service of moving beyond the 'vanity' of his 'splendid gifts.'"

   His contemporaries included the French Impressionists. Unlike them, however,  Whistler did not seek to express the bravado action of his brushstrokes while recording nature directly. He was more concerned with the "nature of painting than the painting of nature". Thus, he would form an image of the painting in his mind to the fullest extent possible, and then would create an evocative, suggestive masterwork in the studio. This was the period during which he completed many of his famous Nocturnes.

   "The difficulty of appreciating much of Whistler's work is our tendency to try and translate all art into words. 'What is it all about - what does it mean?' But we do not ask such questions about a delicious scent . . . nor of one of Chopin's nocturnes . . . Why, then, may not a painter blend color as a musician blends sound, to express something which cannot be adequately put into words, and call it, for lack of a better term, 'a symphony in color'? or veil his colors in that mysterious luminous shade night flings over nature and call it a nocturne?  We enjoy the fragrance of a scent without putting it into words - why may not our sense of sight be delighted by abstract colors?"
                                Attributed to C. H. Caffin Harper's Weekly, 1898
 
   Although we view these as masterworks today, they were controversial at the time. Critics brought forward charges that the value of Whistler's paintings was limited by the speed with which they were produced. Whistler argued that the value of the paintings was related to the knowledge he had gained in the work of his lifetime. "In my pictures there is no cleverness, no brush marks, nothing to astonish or bewilder; but simply a gradual, more perfect growth of beauty - it is this beauty my canvases reveal, not the way it is obtained."