An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Margaret F. MacDonald is Professor Emerita and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow (History of Art) in the School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow. She is Project Director of a recently completed research project to produce an online catalogue raisonné of Whistler’s etchings.

Dr Patricia de Montfort is lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. Her teaching and research interests include the life and work of James McNeill Whistler, nineteenth-century women artists and the nineteenth-century London art market.

Margaret F. MacDonald

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Patricia de Montfort

Philip Wilson Publishers an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road London W2 4BU www.philip-wilson.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-78130-022-0

t h e s m i t h s o n i a n’s m u s e u m s o f a s i a n a r t

9 781781 300220

A n A m er ica n i n Lon don

Whistler

and the Thames

In the 1860s and 1870s Whistler produced a body of work based on the Thames. Pivotal to his career, this beautiful group of paintings, prints and drawings permits a detailed examination of his approach to composition, subject and technique. The earliest paintings, notably Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge, produced soon after his arrival in London, mark one of his most profound and successful challenges to the art establishment of the time.

As well as allowing a detailed study of the evolution of an artist, these works show the Thames under contrasting climatic conditions, from Chelsea in Ice to the lovely Nocturne: Grey and Gold – Westminster Bridge, which depicts the deep blue of warm summer evenings. They bring to life Victorian London: the workers and women who frequented the Thames-side wharves and pubs, the shipping that thronged the Pool, the barges that navigated the perilous passage under the bridges, and the steamboats and ferries crowded with daytrippers.

The Nocturnes of the 1870s mark an important breakthrough in Whistler’s art: his shift from French Realism to sophisticated harmony, based on mood and atmosphere, but still rooted in a literal rendering of the Thames waterside. The famous Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge is the culmination of his bridge paintings; here the influence of Japanese prints reached its fullest form.

This comprehensive and handsomely illustrated study presents the definitive examples of Whistler’s radical new aesthetic approach to the time-honoured subject of the city and river. In addition, the works reveal to us his world – the exhibitions, the personalities, the buildings, the style, and the atmosphere which inform his art and root this American cosmopolitan securely in the ranks of artists inspired by London and the Thames.

Cover: Grey and Silver: Old Battersea Reach, 1863, oil on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago Inside covers: James Wyld, Wyld’s New Plan of London, 1853, map on linen, University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections

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A N A M ER ICA N I N LON DON

WHISTLER

AND THE THAMES

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A N A M ER ICA N I N LON DON

WHISTLER

AND THE THAMES

Margaret F. MacDonald Patricia de Montfort

t h e s m i t h s o n i a n’s m u s e u m s o f a s i a n a r t

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Published on occasion of the exhibition An American in London: Whistler and the Thames Dulwich Picture Gallery, 16 October 2013 – 12 January 2014 Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, 1 February – 13 April 2014 Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2 May – 17 August 2014 © Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2013 Published by Philip Wilson Publishers an imprint of I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road London W2 4BU www.philip-wilson.co.uk Distributed in the United States and Canada exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 ISBN Hardback 978-1-78130-006-0 ISBN Softcover 978-1-78130-022-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior permission of the publishers.

The right of Margaret F. MacDonald and Patricia de Montfort to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by the authors in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Designed by Pippa Kate Bridle Printed and bound in Spain by Grafo S.A.

SUPPORTERS ADDISON GALLERY OF AMERICAN ART, PHILLIPS ACADEMY An anonymous foundation Edward P. Bass (Phillips Academy Class of 1963) on his 50th reunion, in honor of Brian T. Allen (by The Bass Foundation) Michael Scharf (Phillips Academy Class of 1960) and Fiona Scharf Andrew Scharf (Phillips Academy Class of 2002) William Scharf (Phillips Academy Class of 2004) Thomas C. Foley (Phillips Academy Class of 1971) and Leslie Fahrenkopf Foley Leslie G. Callahan III (Phillips Academy Class of 1968) and Barbara Keenan Callahan David Carter (Phillips Academy Class of 1941) and Louise Carter DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery American Friends of Dulwich Picture Gallery American Art Supporters’ Group Michael Marks Charitable Trust Farrow & Ball This exhibition has been made possible for Dulwich Picture Gallery by the provision of insurance through the Government Indemnity Scheme. Dulwich Picture Gallery would like to thank HM Government for providing Government Indemnity and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and Arts Council England for arranging the indemnity.

FREER GALLERY OF ART, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts Half title: taken from Thames Warehouses, 1859, etching and drypoint Colby College Museum of Art, The Lunder Collection, Maine (cat. 8) Frontispiece: Wapping, 1860–64, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (cat. 29, detail) Endpiece: taken from Whistler with a hat, 1859, etching and drypoint British Museum, London (cat. 2)

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Contents

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6

Directors’ Foreword

7

Curators’ Acknowledgements

9

Introduction: An American in London

13

Whistler and the Thames Margaret F. MacDonald

31

‘Painting river pictures’: Whistler’s Chelsea subjects Patricia de Montfort

51 53 57 81 99 113 125 133 147 153

Catalogue Etching and Drypoint The Thames set The Oil Paintings: Whistler’s ‘Daylights’ Chelsea Lithographs and Lithotints: from Limehouse to Old Battersea Bridge Nocturnes Old Battersea Bridge Japonisme Photographs

168

List of Works

177

Notes

182

Bibliography

184

Chronology

186

Chronology of Whistler’s Thames Subjects

188

Copyright and Photographic Credits

189

Index

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Catalogue

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The Oil Paintings: Whistler’s ‘Daylights’ The years between 1859, when Alexander Ionides first commissioned Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (cat. 25), and 1870 represent a period of experimentation for Whistler but also one of uncertainty and artistic self-doubt. On the one hand, he was writing excitedly to his old friend in Paris, the dealer George Lucas: ‘The White Girl’ was refused at the Academy where they only hung the Brittany Sea piece and the Thames Ice Sketch! both of which they have stuck in as bad a place as possible – Nothing daunted I am now exhibiting the White Child at another exposition where she shows herself proudly to all London! that is to all London who goes to see her! She looks grandly in her frame and creates an excitement in the Artistic World here which the Academy did not prevent, or forsee after turning it out I mean.82 On the other, while Courbet’s method of applying thick layers of impasto and treatment of subject matter had appealed to him in works like The Coast of Brittany or Alone with the Tide (1861; Wadsworth Athenaeum), Whistler became increasingly diverted by Japanese

Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf, 1864/68, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (cat. 36, detail)

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art over the next few years, both in his etched work and in oils like Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (1863–64; Philadelphia Museum of Art), with its blue and white porcelain and other Oriental accessories, and in the Graeco-Japanese Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses (cat. 34).

Whistler’s letters to his friend Henri Fantin-Latour in Paris reveal his often tortuous efforts to pursue his own artistic path.

‘I have also done two little pictures of the Thames – an old bridge, and an effect of fog,’ he told him in January 1864, but, he despaired, ‘I thought they were all right when I finished but now I don’t care for them – Oh Fantin I know so little – things do not go quickly!’83 Indeed, according to Arthur Severn,84 he took many weeks over The Last of Old Westminster (cat. 26), the wooden piles supporting the bridge and the appearance of the workmen. However, views like Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf (cat. 36) exhibit a freer handling of the paint and a lighter palette, if much reworking – evidence of Whistler’s continuing technical experiments. By the time that he was painting Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea (cat. 38) in 1871–72, he was beginning to evolve his liquid paint technique that enabled him to work faster in thin layers of pigment.

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Cat. no. 25 Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge, commissioned 1859, signed 1863, oil on canvas, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts This was Whistler’s first painting of Old Battersea Bridge. Commissioned by the Greek shipping merchant Alexander C. Ionides after the Royal Academy exhibition of 1859, it was completed and exhibited at the R.A. in 1865. It was painted thickly in muted shades of grey, greyish blue and brown on a fine weave canvas over a selfportrait of the artist. It shows the view down river from Lindsey Row, Chelsea, with the factories of Battersea seen across the river and the Crystal Palace on the horizon. A critic wrote: ‘So true are the gradations, so correct the relative tone fixed on for each object, so unaffected the arrangement of the boats, the bridge, and the shore, that one seems to be looking back right into last November, through a little square in the Academy walls.’85

82

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The Oil Paintings: Whistler’s ‘Daylights’

Cat. no. 26 The Last of Old Westminster, 1862, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A. Shuman Collection The new Westminster Bridge was built over the old bridge; it was operational in 1860 but work continued into 1862. Whistler painted it over several weeks, from Walter Severn’s rooms in Manchester Buildings (site of New Scotland Yard). Severn described Whistler at work: ‘He would look steadily at a pile for some time, then mix up the colour, then holding his brush right at the end, with no mahlstick, make a downward stroke and the pile was done.’ He added, ‘these piles looked all about the same grey, and the shirts of the little figures working looked to me all the same white, but Whistler spent much time getting various tones out of the heaps of colour on his large palette. After securing the exact shade of grey or white which he wanted he did his pile or shirt with a few dexterous dabs.’86

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Cat. no. 27 Grey and Silver: Old Battersea Reach, 1863, oil on canvas The Art Institute of Chicago An impressionistic panorama of Battersea, to right of the view seen in Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (cat. 25). The factories are shown in considerable detail, painted in a limited range of greys, blue-greys and browns, colours picked up in the boldly sketched sailing barges on the river, and boats on the foreshore, where workmen – probably from the Greaves boatyard – beach their rowing boats. Although painted in 1863, it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1867 as ‘Battersea’, and renamed for Whistler’s retrospective exhibition of Nocturnes, Marines & Chevalet Pieces at Goupil’s in 1892 – when most of his Thames pictures were reunited. At that time it was sold for £450 to Mrs Potter Palmer and described by Whistler as ‘one of the most readily accepted’.87

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The Oil Paintings: Whistler’s ‘Daylights’

Cat. no. 28 Battersea Reach, ca 1863, oil on canvas Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC ‘It was a view of the opposite bank of the river, from out of my window, on a brilliant autumn evening, and the painting is a favourite of mine,’ said Whistler at the Whistler v. Ruskin trial.

He told a picture restorer that it was painted ‘as well as I remember, in one go and consequently ... not much impasted’. It is indeed painted thinly, except for the vigorous brushstrokes on the boats in the foreground. Whistler described it later as ‘a most gorgeous bit of colour’.88

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Cat. no. 29 Wapping, 1860–64, oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Wapping was painted from a balcony over the Thames at The Angel, a pub at Cherry Gardens, Bermondsey. In the same pub he etched Rotherhithe (cat. 12), with two sailors seated, smoking, on the balcony. The painting was started in 1860, with the passing shipping carefully observed, and painted impressionistically in fresh, bright colours. The figures were altered, repositioned, replaced and repainted several times both on site and back in the Lindsey Row studio over several years. In particular, the figure of Whistler’s mistress, the redhaired Irish model, Joanna Hiffernan, originally shown as a sailor’s ‘molly’ or prostitute, was repainted to assume a darker, more modest and reflective persona before the painting went to the Royal Academy in 1865.

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Chelsea In March 1863 Whistler settled at 7 Lindsey Row, on the Thames in Chelsea. Neighbours included Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Algernon Swinburne. In 1867 he moved down to 2 Lindsey Row (96 Cheyne Walk) where he stayed for the next eleven years.

The Greaves brothers – Walter and Henry – lived a few doors up at 9 and 10 Lindsey Row. They rowed Whistler about the river, helped in the studio, and themselves worked on paintings of the Thames. Literary editor and biographer of the Italian nationalist Guiseppe Mazzini, Mme Emilie Venturi, also lived a few doors along. A friend and patron, she acquired from the artist the vivid, impressionistic oil painting Chelsea In Ice (cat. 35) and she greatly admired his Ten O’Clock Lecture.99 He moved out in June 1878 to live briefly at the White House in Tite Street, designed by E.W. Godwin as a studio and house.

The White House was lost, along with everything he owned – art, collections, pots (Chinese and every-day) and pans – when he went bankrupt less than a year later. However, except for fourteen months in Venice 1879–80 and several years in Paris in the 1890s, he lived close to the Thames in Chelsea for the rest of his life. He died at 72 Cheyne Walk in 1903.

No. 2 Lindsey Row was a three-storey townhouse (plus attic), with the kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, sitting room and studio on the first floor. Across the road was the River Thames, with Battersea Bridge to the left, the factories of Battersea across the river, and a gentle curve up-river past the pleasure gardens of Cremorne, to the right. Over forty years, Whistler drew and painted the river in all seasons and weather from the riverbank, from the bridge and nearby jetties and piers, and from

Pink and Silver – Chelsea, the Embankment, 1885, watercolour on white wove paper, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts (cat. 50, detail)

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the first-floor room of Lindsey Row with its balcony.

The streets of Chelsea were lined with small shops – the decaying façade of Maunder’s Fish Shop in Lombard Street (later 72 Cheyne Walk) attracted many local artists, including Whistler.

The streetscape also attracted the local photographer James Hedderly (1814–1885) who worked from a studio at 2 Duke Street from 1868 to 1871 and later at 21 Riley Street, Kings Road.

Hedderly’s photographs record the lives of local street traders, shoppers and promenaders before and after the construction of the Chelsea Embankment, completed in 1874. Sections of the streetscape between Beaufort Street and Cheyne Walk – Duke Street and Lombard Street – were partly demolished to make way for this new stretch of the Embankment and the picturesque winding roadway along the riverbank was replaced by a wide new, modern highway. Hedderly’s photographs (cats. 92–96) convey these dramatic changes vividly.

The proximity of Lindsey Row to the Thames meant that the river was a daily feature of Whistler’s existence there. There were panoramic views from the upper floors of both his houses from which he could observe passing barges, but through journeys on the river itself he could become more closely acquainted with its wharves and creeks and the riverside topography of Chelsea – from the gardens at the Royal Hospital, along Cheyne Walk, past the Pier Hotel at Cadogan Pier, past Battersea Pier and under the narrow arches of Old Battersea Bridge to Cremorne Road and beyond. The advent of passenger steamboats on the Thames during the 1840s increased leisure traffic. As Herbert Fry advised in 1880, ‘the small Steamers which ply every five minutes from Chelsea to London Bridge for 2d., and to Woolwich for 5d., touching at the various piers on either side of the river, will enable the visitor to London to make himself easily acquainted, at the smallest possible expense, with this “great silent highway”’.100

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Chelsea

Cat. no. 48 Battersea, 1878, watercolour on off-white wove paper British Museum, London An almost monochromatic study, this may be connected with Whistler’s lithotints, such as the Early Morning of 1878 (cat. 55). The colours are shades of grey, having a wonderful misty quality: some were mixed with white; others have a touch of blue, as on the barges at right. Whistler built up the picture with a series of washes. The reflection of the boat’s sail and the two barges behind were only one wash, but the boat itself had at least three washes, laid on with plenty of water and drying with a hard line at the edge. Some of the brushwork is angular, some spiky. Some effects, like the smoke, were obtained by carefully removing paint, after the washes had dried. Further subtleties were achieved in the slender reflections of the three chimneys, which were brushed hard over a couple of horizontal brushstrokes when the washes were nearly dry.

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Cat. no. 49 Blue and Silver: The Thames, 1882, watercolour on off-white paper Private Collection, Ann Arbor, Michigan In 1882 Whistler’s friend, the architect E.W. Godwin, was living at Westminster, looking down to Hungerford Bridge and St Paul’s. This was not Whistler’s first watercolour (he had been painting watercolours since he was ten) but it marked his increased interest in the medium. The view was vignetted, with details drawn delicately with a small brush in shades of pink and orange, grey and purple. The masses of cloud and still water were painted freely, using the rough texture of the paper for added effect. For the lights, areas of paper were left bare.

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Chelsea

Cat. no. 50 Pink and Silver – Chelsea, the Embankment, 1885, watercolour on white wove paper Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts This was done while Whistler was out sketching, with the young lithographer T.R. Way, on a windy day on the Embankment.103 The Albert Bridge is seen in the background. The figures are touched with pale orange, pink and red, set against the grey and blues of the sky. It was painted quickly, with untidy washes, catching the effects of a moment in time. The brushwork is expressive, fluttering selectively over the figures and the embankment, before settling, very precisely, on the butterfly.

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An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

Cat. no. 51 Nocturne: Chelsea Embankment, 1883/84, pen and brown ink on cream wove paper The Hunterian, University of Glasgow This elaborate drawing – possibly started from nature and completed in the studio – shows the young trees planted along the Embankment.102 In the distance are the lights of Chelsea shops. A few years later, in 1888, one of Whistler’s ‘followers’, Theodore Roussel, etched the same scene in one his earliest etchings, Chelsea Embankment with Albert Bridge in the Background (H.6). The free, scratchy use of the pen, the effect of the lights, and figures not outlined but indicated by rough hatching, plus the impressionistic observation of the hansom cab and figures superimposed on the drawing on the right, make this unique among Whistler’s drawings.

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Chelsea

Cat. no. 52 Copy of ‘Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Fire Wheel’, 20 April 1893, watercolour on off-white paper laid down on card The Hunterian, University of Glasgow This is a copy of Nocturne: Black and Gold – The Fire Wheel (Tate: YMSM 169). The original, showing fireworks at Cremorne Gardens, was painted in the mid-1870s; despite several attempts by Whistler to sell it to rich Americans in the 1890s, it was eventually bought by the painter and collector Arthur Studd who left it to the Tate. The oil painting has darkened, and this watercolour records its earlier appearance. The area of the fire wheel itself was painted in watercolour, with the paler areas left bare, and the rest of the surface with deep greys and blues. The washes ran into each other, and the drifting smoke and lights were applied in body colour, light over dark, to imitate the effect of the oil.

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