Titles

Several possible titles have been suggested:

• 'Nocturne à Venise: I'église de Saint-George-Majeur' (1903, Drouot). 1
• 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver "The Lagoon" – Venice' (1904, Copley Society, Boston). 2
• 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice' (1980, YMSM). 3

It is true that the subject is the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, and so the Drouot auction title of 1903 is accurate. However, 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, the title published in Boston in 1904, is the generally accepted title.

Description

A night scene, in horizontal format. Some gondolas float on the water, half seen. In the distance, at right, looms a church with a tall bell-tower, and at far left, the lights and buildings of an island are visible.

Site

A view looking south-east across the Venetian Bacino from the north bank of the entrance to the Grand Canal, showing the Public Gardens at left, the Lido in the distance, and the tower and church of San Giorgio Maggiore at right. 4

Whistler's etching Nocturne [222] shows exactly the same view in reverse, with a tall ship on one side balancing the tower on the other.

The Museum of Fine Arts website comments:

'In this composition, painted from the Piazzetta near the Royal Gardens, the sparkling colors of Venice are reduced to an ethereal blue and grayish silver that seem to mimic the city’s elusive structure. In the background, the silhouette of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore hovers without substance, while the distant lights of the strand at the Lido glimmer along the horizon. Whistler has captured Venice in the way the poet Lord Byron had described it – a “fairy city of the heart.” [Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 4, stanza 18.]' 5