The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler

Date

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice dates from Whistler's extended stay in Venice from September 1879 to October 1880. ¹

By April 1880 Whistler was planning to return and told Matthew Robinson Elden (1839-1885): 'I have worked very well -... and shall bring, I hope, ... a large painting - but this last you must keep quite for yourself and the doctor.' ² However, it is not certain to which, if any, of the extant Venetian oils he is referring: Nocturne: Blue and Gold - St Mark's, Venice y213, Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon,Venice y212, or the missing portrait, A Gondolier y216.

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

It is just possible that he left Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice in Venice with William Graham (1841-1910), who eventually offered to return some canvases to Whistler, in the 1890s, and Whistler answered:

'I shall be glad indeed to have again the paintings I left behind in lovely Venice, though they were but beginnings - It was so good of you to care for them for me - and like all your kindness to me - which I always remember.' ³

Images

Subject

Titles

Several possible titles have been suggested:

• 'Nocturne à Venise: I'église de Saint-George-Majeur' (1903, Drouot). ⁴
• 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver "The Lagoon" – Venice' (1904, Copley Society, Boston). ⁵
• 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice' (1980, YMSM). ⁶

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

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon,Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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. ⁷

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.]' ⁸

Technique

Technique

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The scene was painted with thin oil washes on a coarse weave canvas, in size roughly equivalent to the French 'toile de 15' (50 x 65 cm).

The conservator Sandra Kelberlau examined the canvas at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2007, and her findings are summarised as follows:

'It is possible that the painting does not have a ground at all. The reddish brown color seen on the tacking margins is not a ground layer. … The other side of the canvas has a ground and the beginning of a painting. It is possible that the artist flipped the canvas over, coated the unprimed side with a dilute mixture of paint in oil, then proceeded to paint his composition. The picture is painted in such a way that exploits the texture of the canvas; the second layer of paint is thinner than the lower layer so that it sinks into the crevices of the canvas and exposes the lower paint level at the tops of the nubs of the canvas, creating a shimmering effect. The primed side of the canvas may have been too smooth to create this effect, necessitating use of the other side.' ⁹

The paint was smoothed and rubbed down by the artist to blur the shapes of figures, gondolas and ships, and the church, all 'emerging mysteriously from the enveloping misty blue darkness.' ¹⁰

Marc Simpson comments perceptively on Whistler's method and colour in this painting

'there is rich colour across its whole surface: no monochromatic flatness but an iridescence that results, painting conservators tell us, from thin veils of varying blue-grays (each comprising the three primary colors with admixtures of black and white) lying atop a roughened, absorbent canvas. Whistler's technical choices enrich the mute colours and exploit the texture of paint, "creating a shimmering effect." Through these unobtrusive means, rainbows of color lurk in the interstices of canvas warp and weft. This chromatic richness, just beyond the realm of casual sight, suggests depth and space, object and void, movement and stillness.' ¹¹

Simpson adds 'The picture is … unlike most advanced painting of the era in two ways. First, so much darkness without focal points of illuminated interest is unusual … Second, and even more striking, there is no claim of virtuosic handling of brush or palette knife, no homage to paint's materiality. The wonder of the scene – its dark muteness – is augmented by the mystery, not the overt mastery, of its making.' ¹²

Conservation History

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, photograph, 1950s

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Unknown.

Frame

1903: the style and whereabouts of the original frame are unknown.

Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon, Venice, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

ca 1904: Whistler-style slope frame, American made, dating from ca 1904.

History

Provenance

• 1898/1902: Carmen Rossi (b. ca 1878, Paris;
• 1903: sold by her at auction, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 25 November 1903 (lot 1) as 'Nocturne à Venise: l'église de Saint-George-Majeur', and bought by William Stephen Marchant (1868-1925), London art dealer, for Richard Albert Canfield (1855-1914), Providence, RI, for 18,500 francs;
• 1914: sold by him to M. Knoedler & Co., New York dealers, March 1914;
• 1914/1915: sold by Knoedler's to Anna Blaksley Barnes (Mrs William H. Bliss) (1851-1935), New York;
• 1935: by descent to her daughter Mildred Barnes (Mrs Robert Bliss) (1879-1969), Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C.;
• 1942: sold by Mrs Robert Woods Bliss to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for $9,000.

According to Whistler's sister-in-law, Rosalind Birnie Philip (1873-1958), ' "Nocturne Blue & Silver"- the Lagoon Venice' was 'extracted' by Whistler's model Carmen Rossi from his studio in Paris. ¹³

Carmen Rossi was Whistler's model for many years. She was suspected of stealing drawings and paintings from the studio (see Rose et or: La Napolitaine y505) but this was not proven, and Whistler was so fond of her that he never took action against her, although he attempted (unsuccessfully) to do so against the dealers who bought things from her.

The painting was sold by Carmen Rossi at the Hôtel Drouot, 25 November 1903 (lot 1) and bought by William Marchant for the collector and gambler R. A. Canfield. Its provenance thereafter is well established.

Exhibitions

• 1904: Oil Paintings, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Mr. J. McNeill Whistler, Copley Society, Boston, 1904 (cat. no.67) as 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver "The Lagoon" – Venice'.

It was not exhibited in Whistler's lifetime.

Bibliography

Catalogues Raisonnés

• Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980 (cat. no. 212), plate 151, as 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver: The Lagoon,Venice'.

Authored by Whistler

• None.

Catalogues 1855-1905

EXHIBITION:

• Oil Paintings, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings: Memorial Exhibition of the Works of Mr. J. McNeill Whistler, Copley Society, Boston, 1904 (cat. no.67) as 'Nocturne in Blue and Silver "The Lagoon" – Venice'.

SALE:

• Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 25 November 1903 (lot 1) as 'Nocturne à Venise: I'église de Saint-George-Majeur'.

Journals 1855-1905

• None.

Monographs

• None.

Books on Whistler

• Cary, Elizabeth Luther, The Works of James McNeill Whistler: A Study, with a Tentative List of Artist’s Works, New York, 1907 (cat. no. 90).
• Grieve, Alastair, Whistler's Venice, New Haven and London, 2000, p. 170, pl. 220.
• Lane, James W., Whistler, (American Artists Series), New York, 1942, repr. p. 72.
• MacDonald, Margaret F., Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice, Aldershot and California, 2001, pp. 30-31, pl. 31.
• Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell, The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 2 vols, London and Philadelphia, 1908, vol. 1, p. 272.
• Sickert, Bernhard, Whistler, London and New York, 1908 (cat. no. 67).
• Spencer, Robin, Whistler, New York, 1990, p. 106-07.

Books, General

• Gaunt, William, Marine Painting: An historical survey, London, 1975, p. 168, repr.
• Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 176-77, 180.

Catalogues 1906-Present

COLLECTION:

• Davis, Elliot Bostwick, et al., American Painting, MFA Highlights, Boston: MFA Publications, 2003.

EXHIBITION:

• Oils, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings by James McNeill Whistler lent by Mr. Richard Canfield, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Buffalo, 1911 (cat. no. 5).
• Oils, Water Colors, Pastels and Drawings by J. McN. Whistler, Knoedler & Co., New York, 1914 (cat. no. 4) as 'Nocturne: Blue and silver'.
• White, Nelson C., James McNeill Whistler Seventeenth Anniversary Exhibition, Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT, 1949 (cat. no. 30).
• Young, A. McLaren, James McNeill Whistler, Arts Council Gallery, London, and Knoedler Galleries, New York, 1960 (cat. no. 43).
• Taynton, Carol (intro.), Whistler in New England Collections, [checklist], Boston, 1977 (no cat. number).
• Richard Dorment, “Whistler v. Ruskin,” in Dorment, Richard, and Margaret F. MacDonald, James McNeill Whistler, Tate Gallery, London, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1994-1995, pp. 136-38.
• Lochnan, Katharine, 'Turner, Whistler, Monet: an artistic dialogue', pp. 15-35, repr, p. 26, in Lochnan, Katharine, Turner, Whistler, Monet, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris; Tate Britain, London, 2004-2005 (cat. no. 105).
• 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 pp. 25-27, 31, 45 note 2, repr. pp. 24-26.

Journals 1906-Present

• Anon., 'Superb Collection of Thirty-four Works by James McNeill Whistler', Academy Notes, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, vol. 6, no. 2, April 1911, pp. 33-38, repr. p. 37.

Websites

• Museum of Fine Arts website at http://www.mfa.org/collections.

Unpublished

• Revillon, Joseph Whistler, Draft Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings of J. McN. Whistler, [ca 1945-1955], Glasgow University Library (cat. no. 94).

Other

• Siewert, John, 'Whistler’s Nocturnes and the Aesthetic Subject', PhD thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1994, p. 13.