The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler

YMSM 115
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights

Artist: James McNeill Whistler
Date: 1872
Collection: Tate Britain, London
Accession Number: N03420
Medium: oil
Support: canvas
Size: 50.2 x 74.9 cm (19 1/2 x 29 1/4")
Signature: butterfly
Inscription: '72'
Frame: Grau-style, after 1903, modified ca 1919

Date

In its present form Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights dates from 1872. 1 It is signed and dated '72'.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain

It was, however, painted over a figure subject related to the so-called 'Six Projects' (such as Symphony in Blue and Pink y086), which were painted between 1868 and 1870.

The destruction of the original painting may have been caused by Whistler's concern over similarities between his work and that of Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893), which came to a head in the autumn of 1870. Although Whistler was reassured by William Eden Nesfield (1835-1888) that the similarities were superficial, this may have been the defining moment, when Whistler abandoned the 'Projects' and turned to night, mist and water for inspiration. 2

Images

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, photograph, 1950s?
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, photograph, 1950s?

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, X-ray
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, X-ray

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, framed
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, framed

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, frame detail
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, frame detail

'Fantasie...', Society, 13 May 1882, GUL Whistler PC 4/113
'Fantasie...', Society, 13 May 1882, GUL Whistler PC 4/113

r.: Sketch of Battersea Reach for a Nocturne, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute
r.: Sketch of Battersea Reach for a Nocturne, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute

Symphony in Blue and Pink, Freer Gallery of Art
Symphony in Blue and Pink, Freer Gallery of Art

Subject

Titles

Several possible titles have been suggested:

The painting may have been exhibited under various titles and is therefore difficult to identify with certainty in catalogues, and it is true the colours could be interpreted as grey or blue, or, more poetically, as silver or gold.

'Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights' is the preferred title.

Description

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain

A river scene in horizontal format, looking across and up a broad river, with factories and chimneys on the river bank at upper left, on a grey evening with lights reflecting from buildings on the right. A few leaves are just visible at lower left. Above them there is a faint suggestion of a small lighter, barge, or driftwood, on the water.

Site

It shows the river Thames, either from Whistler's house in Lindsey Row or perhaps from Battersea Bridge, with the Battersea factories on the left and the pleasure gardens at Cremorne, Chelsea, at upper right.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain

r.: Sketch of Battersea Reach for a Nocturne, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute
r.: Sketch of Battersea Reach for a Nocturne, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute

Although this view may have been painted from Whistler's house in Lindsey Row, it could have been based on drawings such as r.: Sketch of Battersea Reach for a Nocturne; v.: Illegible (skyline?) m0474. Whistler drew and painted this view so often that he could have drawn it from memory, and such sketches probably formed the basis for some Nocturnes of the Battersea shore.

Comments

Andrew Wilton comments:

'It was noticed … that the series of night or twilight scenes on the Thames that Whistler painted in the early 1870s were a continuation of the thought behind the "Six Projects" of the years immediately preceding. The point is underlined by the fact that there are traces of a figure subject akin to those of the "Six Projects" beneath the paint of this Nocturne, a change of purpose that embodied for the authors of the 1994 catalogue "the transition from the decorative figure subjects of the 1870s to the Nocturnes and portraits which dominated the 1870s". As with Watts … the continuity between figure subjects and landscapes is real and significant ... Whereas Watts tended to incorporate literal or implied symbolic content in both his allegories and his landscapes, Whistler was content in both his arrangements of figures and his river views simply to suggest states of mind by means of subtly deployed colour harmonies and restrained compositional devices.

The composition of this Nocturne is a development out of the Nocturne in Blue and Silver 15 of the previous year: although rather wider in format, its layout is almost identical, with empty foreground and high horizon; yet its scale is much more expansive and its colour register higher, more luminous. The sluggish, sleeping river enclosed by the great capital city has given way to a silvery highway, seen from Battersea Bridge, leading to an enchanted fairground, the Cremorne pleasure gardens just beyond Chelsea: the opposition of man and nature seems here to be reconciled in a dreamlike idyll.' 16

Technique

Composition

Symphony in Blue and Pink, Freer Gallery of Art
Symphony in Blue and Pink, Freer Gallery of Art

Traces of a figure subject, similar in style to the so-called 'Six Projects' (Symphony in Green and Violet y083, Variations in Blue and Green y084, Symphony in White and Red y085 etc.), can be seen, very faintly, below the surface of the nocturne. 17

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, X-ray
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, X-ray

A recent thorough examination of the canvas was undertaken by Professor Joyce H. Townsend, Tate Britain, and her report follows:

'The original priming, applied only to the picture plane, was off-white and gave the canvas a reasonably smooth texture. Whistler’s first composition included a woman on the left of the canvas in a Japanese-inspired robe, bending at the knees or kneeling and trailing a fan, looking to the right. A second figure nearer to the centre of the canvas is less distinct: likely it is a woman in a similar robe, kneeling and facing to the left. A few brushstrokes can be discerned on the right, but no more figures. X-radiography does not suggest that a great deal of this image has survived, though there was probably some paint wiped away at lower right.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, photograph, 1950s?
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, photograph, 1950s?

In a photograph possibly dating from the 1950s, reproduced above, the shadowy figure to the left is just visible, and in 1993 Tate photographers emulated that image using technical panchromatic film, which was the type used in the earlier twentieth century and most likely for that photograph. 18

The earlier composition had a thin brown imprimatura that survives as brown speckles in the valleys of the rubbed-down surface, without negating the optical contribution of the original off-white priming. It extends to the present right edge.' 19

Technique

Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain
Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights, Tate Britain

Whistler did not apply an imprimatura for the nocturne. Once the figure composition had been rubbed down, the main elements in the new composition were sketched in. The river was painted with long flowing brushstrokes reaching right across the canvas. Pentimenti are visible around the raft/lighter/barge near the shore.

Professor Townsend's technical survey of the painting continues:

'Whistler had the canvas enlarged at the right side, by incorporating some 2 centimetres of canvas that had been wrapped round the stretcher edge into the picture plane, onto an added strip of wood, and having the canvas lined with glue paste to another canvas. This was done before painting the first composition on the brown imprimatura, which extends over the enlarged strip. Lining typically makes the canvas weave more prominent than it is in an unlined canvas: clearly Whistler did not object to this underlying texture, for an image that is unusually dependent on the texture created by near-parallel lines of paint.

This later composition involved applying a thin and broadly horizontal wash of dark paint (probably black and raw umber) to form the shoreline, the buildings and the boat. Effectively, it is a local underpainting. Then a `sauce' made of diluted oil paint was brushed in long wide sweeps right across the painting. This paint is a very pale blue made up of synthetic ultramarine, Prussian blue, madder and another red lake, but mostly lead white. It was brushed with a stiff and flat hogshair brush about 2 centimetres wide, the bristles of which have left wide furrows in the paint. There is very little rubbing-down of the paint compared to other canvases, but in places this can be seen with a microscope. Such dilute paint could readily be wiped off, rendering this favourite method unnecessary here.

The brush was fairly evenly loaded and the paint was applied confidently yet sparingly from left to right in horizontal sweeps, with deviations around the buildings, and only occasionally a slight hesitation. The dark outer edges of the shoreline and the boat were covered very thinly with blue paint, utilising the turbid medium effect to create soft outlines to them. Features such as chimneys were quickly worked into the wet paint by removing some `sauce' with a sharp edge, while other features were made by scraping with the brush handle.

The lights on the shore were applied with a round brush loaded with lead white and cadmium yellow with some added vermilion, possibly used straight from the paint tube but already roughly mixed on the palette, applied so as to give narrow streaks of these colours. Compared to the fluid blue paint, these areas stand out thickly. They were applied once and then left alone, not reworked. The effect of ripples in the water was achieved by painting the reflection line wet-in-wet vertically over the horizontal brushstrokes for the blue water, then dragging blue paint back across it. Whistler used the turbidity of the pale blue paint applied over a vestigial brown imprimatura to cool and soften the image, directly emulating atmospheric perspective.

With the exception of the lights on the shore, the paint is highly thinned with turpentine, and this would tend to make it dry matte in a manner inappropriate to the depiction of water, and to form drips and runs too. The addition of either an oil or a resin-based medium modifier, likely involving a mastic-type resin, would counteract the matteness. All the evidence points to the use of the latter over the former addition: the appearance of the paint in ultraviolet light, the way it softens on heating, and its high refractive index. The last property contributes to its transparent appearance, which reveals the earlier image, while also contributing to the ethereal quality Whistler sought for a nocturne. These modifiers also counteracted the tendency of the paint to run and flow. While working with the canvas flat would have achieved the same thing, it might have been possible with medium modifiers to work on an easel as the artist did for portraits, and to retreat from the canvas to observe it at normal viewing distance, which was a frequent habit noted by sitters.

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, detail
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, detail

The butterfly signature fully occupies the enlarged strip at the right edge, and was applied to dried paint, using a narrow brush and slightly thinned tube paint. It consists of two crossing horizontal strokes of paint, a shorter one beneath, and a final vertical brushstroke. It would have been painted rapidly and with assurance, just like the reflected lights in the water. It is covered with a protective brushstroke of varnish that might not be original.' 20

Conservation History

It was probably among paintings sent to Stephen Richards (1844-1900) to be cleaned, varnished and have the frames gilded, apparently without the owner's consent. D. C. Thomson of Goupil's told Whistler, 'Even although he admits they are improved he maintains very warmly that it was what he calls a disreputable thing for Goupil to do anything without his consent. He refuses to condone what he calls our offence. But all the same we hope to get round him.' 21 J. C. Potter wrote confirming both his objection and his approval: 'I must say, that on seeing the pictures, they appear to me immensely improved by the cleaning. If you are equally satisfied with the execution of the work by Mr Richards, so shall I be.' 22

Professor Townsend comments:

'Whistler’s extension of the canvas had long preceded the cleaning and varnishing by Richard Stephens [in 1892], authorised by the Goupil Gallery but not by the then owner. Lining has not affected the condition or appearance of the painting as much as earlier linings tended to do. The edges have more recently been strip-lined to strengthen them, and at some point the lined-in right edge required retouching, but these treatments are not documented. This may suggest a date during the Second World War, and prior to the formation of the Tate Conservation Department in 1955. By 1993 the non-original varnish(es) were extremely yellow and also uneven, having been applied horizontally with a broad brush some 12-15 centimetres wide. They were removed at Tate by Stephen Hackney, along with old retouchings, and a new varnish of non-yellowing synthetic resin was applied. The painting has not required any treatment since then.' 23

Frame

1873: The frame was originally decorated with a fish-scale pattern. Whistler described his aims to George Aloysius Lucas (1824-1909):

'my frames I have designed as carefully as my pictures - and thus they form as important a part as any of the rest of the work - carrying on the particular harmony throughout - This is of course entirely original with me and has never been done - Though many have painted on their frames but never with real purpose - or knowledge … This I have so thoroughly established here that no one would dare to put any colour whatever ... on their frames without feeling that they would at once be pointed out as forgers or imitators; and I wish this to be also clearly stated in Paris that I am the inventor of all this kind of decoration in color in the frames; that I may not have a lot of clever little Frenchmen trespassing on my ground -

You will see my mark on pictures and frames - It is a butterfly and does as a monogram for J.W. Characteristic I dare say you will say in more ways than one!' 24

This painting’s first frame, now lost, had a painted pattern, which may have followed that seen on Tate’s Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea y103, painted in 1871.

1892: Whistler suggested that the painting’s owner, Gerald Potter (1829-1908), should get all his works reframed by Frederick Henry Grau (1859-1892), and this may have been done before the Goupil Gallery exhibition of 1892. However, Potter refused to pay the cost of reframing and may well have retained Whistler’s first frame to avoid the expense of a replacement that he had not requested. 25

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, framed
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, framed

Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, frame detail
Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights, frame detail

After 1903, modified ca 1919: The present frame is a replica of a Grau-style frame, possibly the painting’s third frame: gold leaf (oil gilding) on wood (pine).

This Grau-style frame may have been a replica made after the painting was acquired by Arthur Haythorne Studd (1863-1919), possibly made after Whistler’s death in 1903, and prior to Studd's bequest of the work to Tate in 1919.

History

Provenance

It is not known for sure what happened to it at the time of Whistler's bankruptcy in 1879, but it is likely that it was on deposit with H. Graves & Co., as security for a loan. However, it was available for exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery in May 1882, and on 11 June 1882 Alan Summerly Cole (1846-1934) noted in his diary having seen 'Cremorne Symphonies' in Whistler's studio. 26

Whistler told two art dealers, Edward Guthrie Kennedy (1849-1932) of New York and Alexander Reid (1854-1928) of Glasgow, that Gerald Potter had originally bought the painting for 'fifty or may be thirty' pounds sterling. 27 Whistler later described Potter as paying '£30 or 40' and complained to another former patron, Alexander Ionides (1840-1898), of what he saw as unfair profiteering. 28 And in one draft of a letter to Potter himself (which may never have been sent) he said the price had been '100 - or was it 80', but he seems to have had second thoughts, and in another draft he wrote, 'what was the bargain you made of The Nocturne? did you at last get it for £50 - or 30?' 29 So it is not at all clear exactly when or for what price Potter actually bought the nocturne.

The process of selling it, however, is excessively well documented. Potter put his collection in the hands of D. C. Thomson of Goupil's, who took the paintings to Glasgow in 1893. Described as a 'nocturne, "Battersea Reach", in blue and gold' by the Glasgow Herald, it was exhibited in Glasgow in 1893, with Whistler's tacit agreement, since he wanted no works to remain in England. 30 However, after Thomson returned from Glasgow in October, having failed to sell Potter's pictures ̶ Blue and Silver: Blue Wave, Biarritz y041, Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl y052, Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf y054 and Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights y115 – Whistler complained,

'I hear that things are "very bad" in Glasgow! How did you get on? why do you always drag about the pictures of Potters?? Why? Why? Why! ! !

It annoys me very much to think that works of that distinction should be hawked in this persistent way from one end of the land to the other!' 31

Whistler demanded to know the selling price,'I want to know what the shop keeping "art patrons", Potter and others, are making out of my labour - my brain - my name!!' 32 D. C. Thomson asked the new owner (A. H. Studd, an artist and a staunch admirer of Whistler) if he would divulge the price, and Studd apparently agreed, saying that Goupil's had asked £650 for the 'Nocturne in silver and gold' but settled for a lesser sum. 33 Whistler was both pleased with the enhanced prices and furious that his former patrons had benefited: 'Just fancy Potter must have made at least a clean sweep of twelve hundred out of me! - & he has had the advantage of looking at my pictures all these years besides!' 34

According to Hobson, C. L. Freer of Detroit would have given £250,000 for Symphony in White, No. 2: The Little White Girl y052, Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights y115, and Nocturne: Black and Gold - The Fire Wheel y169, but Studd would not sell. 35 They were all bequeathed by Studd to the National Gallery in 1919, and this painting was transferred to the Tate Gallery in 1949.

Exhibitions

1872: It is difficult to identify the works exhibited at the Dudley Gallery, the reviews being rather non-specific, as for instance, that in The Times:

'Mr Whistler sends two of his subtle studies of moonlight (187, 237), in which form is eschewed for harmonies of gray and gold and blue and silver so delicate that they require a disciplined perception to follow; ... for the few their rare qualities of truth and beauty are as unquestionable as the strange gifts of the painter, who, in his special sense of these infinite delicacies of misty tone and silvery or golden colour, seems disposed to reduce art to the expression of them, to the exclusion alike of detail, form, and all that is commonly understood as "subject." In a word, painting to Mr. Whistler is the exact correlative of music. … Rare as is the power the painter shows in this work of his predilection, his success cannot disguise the fact that he is really building up art out of his own imperfections.' 36

1873: Whistler exhibited a number of Thames views with Durand Ruel in Paris, and it is quite likely that this painting, dating from the previous year, was among them (see Views of the Thames y138).

As he told G. A. Lucas:

'They are not merely canvasses having interest in themselves alone, but are intended to indicate slightly to "those whom it may concern" something of my theory in art - The science of color and "picture pattern" as I have worked it out for myself during these years … Go and see and also fight any battles for me about them with the painter fellows you may find opposed to them - of whom by the way there will doubtless be many - Write me what you may hear and in short as I am not there to see, tell me what effect my work produces, if any ...

This exhibition of mine you will see clearly is especially intended to assert myself to the painters - in short in a manner to register among them in Paris as I have done here, my work.' 37

The possible changes of title make it difficult to track the early exhibiting history of this painting. It is quite likely that it was at Durand-Ruel's in 1873, and somewhat less likely that it was in Brighton in 1875, when a 'Nocturne in blue and gold' was priced at £420: other contenders include Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Battersea Reach y119 and Nocturne in Blue and Gold y141.

'Fantasie...', Society, 13 May 1882, GUL Whistler PC4/113
'Fantasie...', Society, 13 May 1882, GUL Whistler PC4/113

1882: Society, having lyrically described ' "A Nocturne in Blue and Silver" ' as 'a dream of delicate tones dotted with dancing light', published a cartoon of the painting as a piece of music, the lights and reflections being the notes and bars. 38 Whistler's exhibits were much talked about. Modern Society described them as 'a new crop of Mr. Whistler's little jokes', and the Daily Telegraph called it 'inscrutable', and 'a very remarkable production, seemingly based on linear and chromatic canons not yet understood by the vulgar', by which their art critic probably did not intend to be flattering. 39

The Athenaeum, however, found it perfectly comprehensible, and, though commenting that it rendered 'mists' rather than night, described it enthusiastically:

'with exquisite gradations and perfect truth one of these lovely effects of dimly illuminated morning mists on the Thames which nature evidently intended Mr. Whistler to paint. Pallid azure vapours fill the vista just before dawn. On the shores are gleams of orange light. With much skill a drifting raft, giving due solidity to the whole, has been placed in front.' 40

And on 21 June 1882, the gossip column of the Nottingham Evening Post reported that M. Whistler had 'attended the Almack's Sabbath solemnity in the hope of giving tone to the assemblage, and also with a side-view of painting a companion picture to his nocturne of Cremorne'! 41

1883-1884: A year later, in 1883, Whistler wanted to borrow the painting for the Exposition Internationale de Peinture at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris, but it does not seem to have been exhibited there. 42 He also sent the Belgian art critic Octave Maus (1856-1919) to see Potter's paintings 'especially the Nocturne' but if this was with the intention of borrowing it for Les XX in Brussels, it failed. 43

1892: In London, Whistler and the manager of the Goupil Gallery, D. C. Thomson, considered two exhibitions, running consecutively, 'Nocturnes' from 12 or 19 March for three weeks followed by the other paintings on 16 April, and Potter was prepared to lend both his 'nocturnes', Grey and Silver: Chelsea Wharf y054 (which was not really a nocturne at all) and Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights y115. 44 Eventually only one exhibition, a major retrospective, was held, opening on 19 March and including Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Cremorne Lights. In the catalogue entry, Whistler printed short excerpts from the Whistler v. Ruskin trial of 1878. He quoted Thomas Taylor (1817-1880), The Times art critic, as comparing Whistler's nocturnes to 'tinted wall paper.' 45 Whistler also, in the 1892 catalogue, quoted Frederick Wedmore (1844-1921) as claiming that people mistakenly thought that the nocturnes would be 'famous to-morrow because they are not famous to-day.' 46 Goupil's were also planning to sell a set of photographs of works exhibited in the retrospective, but Whistler thought the photograph of this particular nocturne 'too murky and dark' for the Goupil Album. 47

No sooner was the Goupil catalogue printed than Whistler was planning to borrow the painting for an exhibition in Munich; J. C. Potter agreed, but again, arrangements fell through. 48

1893: A year later, the Glasgow Herald of 9 November 1893 described 'nocturne, "Battersea Reach", in blue and gold' as being exhibited in Glasgow by Boussod, Valadon & Cie. (Goupil Gallery), of London. Whistler was prepared to sell to a Scottish collector: 'I want nothing to remain in England - Scotland is another thing', he said. 49 No Scottish collector appeared, and the painting returned to England, where it remains to this day.

Bibliography

Catalogues Raisonnés

Authored by Whistler

Catalogues 1855-1905

Newspapers 1855-1905

Journals 1855-1905

Monographs

Books on Whistler

Books, General

Catalogues 1906-Present

COLLECTION:

EXHIBITION:

Journals 1906-Present

Websites

Unpublished

Other

Notes:

1: YMSM 1980 [more] (cat. no. 115).

2: Whistler to A. Moore, [12/19 September 1870], GUW#04166; W. E. Nesfield to Whistler, 19 September 1870, GUW #04263. See Symphony in Blue and Pink y086 for a description of Whistler's concerns.

3: Second Annual Exhibition of Modern Pictures in Oil and Water Colour, Royal Pavilion Gallery, Brighton, 1875 (cat. no. 98), but see Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Battersea Reach y119, Nocturne in Blue and Gold y141.

4: VI Summer Exhibition, Grosvenor Gallery, London, 1882 (cat. no. 2).

5: Whistler to C. W. Deschamps, [11 January 1884], GUW #07909.

6: List, [1886/1887], formerly dated [4/11 January 1892], GUW #06795.

7: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, [4 January 1892], GUW #08214.

8: Nocturnes, Marines & Chevalet Pieces, Goupil Gallery, London, 1892 (cat. no. 34).

9: J. C. Potter to Whistler, 1 May 1892, GUW #05008.

10: A Collection of Selected Works by Painters of the English, French & Dutch Schools, Goupil Gallery, London, 1898 (cat. no. 25), but see Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Southampton Water y117.

11: 'Literature', Glasgow Herald, Glasgow, 9 November 1893.

12: Studd to Whistler, 27 January 1894, GUW #05610.

13: Œuvres de James McNeill Whistler, Palais de l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1905 (cat. no. 69).

14: YMSM 1980 [more] (cat. no 115).

15: Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea y103, 1871, Tate Britain.

16: Wilton, Andrew, Robert Upstone, et al., The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860-1910, Tate Gallery, London 1997 (cat. no. 80).

17: Stephen Hackney examined the painting and established the form of this underlying figure composition. Hackney 1995 [more].

18: Today, a camera sensitive to the short-wave infrared as well as to visible light, with sensitivity adjustable within this range by using filters, might give more information on the underlying image than did an infrared image taken with a modified conventional camera (not reproduced); the infrared image suggested that there were more dark or black pigments used on the right side than on the left. A transmitted light image (also not illustrated here) did not give any new information.

19: Dr (now Professor) J. H. Townsend, November 2017; see also Hackney, S., ‘Colour and tone in whistler’s “nocturnes” and “harmonies” 1871-72’, The Burlington Magazine, 1994, vol. 136, pp. 695-99; and Hackney, S. and J. H. Townsend, 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Cremorne Lights 1872', in Hackney, S., R. Jones and J. Townsend (eds.), Paint and Purpose: A Study of Technique in British art, Tate Publishing, London, 1999, pp. 86-89.

20: Townsend 2017, op. cit.; Hackney 1994, op. cit.; Hackney and Townsend 1999, op. cit.

21: Thomson to Whistler, 2 April 1892, GUW #05713.

22: J. C. Potter to Whistler, 4 April 1892, GUW #05006.

23: Townsend 2017, op. cit.

24: [18 January 1873], GUW #09182.

25: Whistler to Potter, [26/30 March 1892], and [January/February 1894], GUW #01488 and #13346.

26: Diary, [27 March 1872-18 April 1885], mss copy, GUW #13132.

27: 4 February and 3 March 1894, GUW #09715 and #13510.

28: [15 August 1895], GUW #02364.

29: [January/February 1894] and [21 February 1894], GUW #13346 and #05010.

30: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, [20 July 1893], GUW #08254; Glasgow Herald, Glasgow, 9 November 1893.

31: [10 December 1893], GUW #08287.

32: [22/23 January 1894], GUW #08276.

33: Thomson to Studd, 24 January 1894, GUW #02674; Whistler to Thomson, [25 January 1894], GUW #08275; Studd to Whistler, 27 January 1894, GUW #05610.

34: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, 12 February [1894], GUW #08285.

35: Hobson, G. D., Some Thoughts on the Organisation o f Art after the War, London, [1946], pp. 37-38.

36: 'The Dudley Gallery', The Times, London, 11 November 1872, p. 4.

37: Whistler to G. A. Lucas, [18 January 1873], GUW #09182.

38: Society, 3 and 13 May 1882, press cuttings in GUL Whistler PC 4, pp. 105, 113.

39: Modern Society, 20 May 1882; 'The Grosvenor Gallery', Daily Telegraph, London, 1 May 1882 (press cuttings GUL Whistler PC4, pp. 103, 101). Other reviews kept by Whistler included Court Journal, 6 May 1882; 'L. S. D.', [unidentified newspaper], 12 June 1882 (GUL PC Whistler 4, pp. 115, 117, 113, and numerous others).

40: The Athenaeum, 6 May 1882, p. 576 (GUL Whistler PC4, p. 123).

41: 'London Gossip', Nottingham Evening Post, 21 June 1882, p. 2.

42: Whistler to C. W. Deschamps, [11 January 1884], GUW #07909.

43: Whistler to G. Potter, [1884/1885], GUW #09336.

44: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, [4 January 1892], GUW #08214; Thomson to Whistler, 20 February 1892, GUW #05685.

45: Cross-examination of Taylor, 26 November 1878, as quoted in Nocturnes, Marines & Chevalet Pieces, Goupil Gallery, London, 1892 (cat. no. 34). Merrill gives the quotation as 'if you bring art down to delicacy of tone, it is only like the tone of wall paper.'Merrill 1992 [more], p. 180.

46: Nocturnes, Marines & Chevalet Pieces, Goupil Gallery, London, 1892 (cat. no. 34).

47: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, 2 May 1892, GUW #08205.

48: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, [1/8 April 1892], GUW #08210; J. C. Potter to Whistler, 21 April and 1 May 1892, GUW #05007 and #05008; W. Marchant to Whistler, 29 April 1892, GUW #05733.

49: Whistler to D. C. Thomson, [20 July 1893], GUW #08254.