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Technique
Nocturne: Grey and Silver, Philadelphia Museum of Art
It is painted on fairly fine canvas. It may not have lost in detail over the years but has undoubtedly changed in colour. Whistler's original title was 'Grey & Silver'. Geffroy's description was suitably poetic but not very specific: 'C'est la nuit ... qui lui donne cette couleur inclassée que l'on voit les yeux fermés.' 1 In 1893 George Moore (1852-1933) described it evocatively as 'luminous blue shadow, delicately graduated ... purple above and below, a shadow in the middle of the picture - a little less and there would be nothing.' 2 As Marc Simpson comments, Whistler's admirers 'reveled in the works' power of suggestion' while 'For those negatively inclined, the outrage was equally fervid'. 3
Conservation History
Nocturne: Grey and Silver, photo
Unknown. It is in good condition.
Frame
1892: Grau Whistler frame, signed on the verso by 'F. H. Grau, London.'
Nocturne: Grey and Silver, frame, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Notes:
2: Moore 1893 [more], pp. 22-3; Mireur, H., Dictionnaire des ventes d'art faites en France et à l'étranger pendant les X V II me et X IX me siècles, 9 vols., Paris, 1901-12, vol. 9, p. 501.
3: Simpson, Marc, 'Whistler, Modernism, and the Creative Afflatus', in Simpson, Marc, Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 2008, pp. 24-51, at p. 34.
Last updated: 1st January 2021 by Margaret
