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The Nocturnes: Quintessentially Whistler

© A. Wilson

James Abbot McNeil Whistler, 1834-1903, was perhaps best known for his challenging of the art establishment through his artistic innovations and his lectures in defence of them. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and attended the Military Academy at West Point, withdrawing after a brief stay due to poor grades. He left the US for Paris in 1855 where he became the student of the Swiss classical painter, Charles Gabriel Gleyre. But it wasn't his instruction with Gleyre that truly influenced him, however; it was his friendship with the French realist painter Gustave Courbet. In Paris, Whistler gained fame as an etcher when in 1858 he published his first set of etchings, Twelve Etchings from Nature, a work that became commonly known as the French Set. It was in the following decade that he came to maturity as a painter. The two works that may best illustrate the artist's talent and ability are his two Nocturnes in Black and Gold, the Fire Wheel and the Falling Rocket.

The Fire Wheel was most likely painted about 1872-7. The Fire Wheel was exhibited in London at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1883. Whistler himself considered the Nocturnes to be exceedingly good and the Fire Wheel was one of the artist's favourite works. The Nocturne in Black and Gold- Firewheel may be considered a composition which is gentle and subdued whilst retaining a certain air of urgency. The night is rendered by Whistler as something that is both mysterious and oppressive; hypnotic yet almost frightening. The viewer is forced to fix their gaze upon the fire wheel itself, which, at the risk of overanalysing the work, seems to take on a human form, and looks as if it is swaying in rhythm to the silent music to which the title alludes. The blackness of the canvas is contrasted by the clarity of the sparks of the fire wheel.

Whistler's brushwork in this work was considered by some critics to be rather innovative. It has been noted that while the artist used rather conventional brushstrokes for the black of the background; for the fireburst, he simply let the gold paint drop onto the canvas. The barely visible fountain is comprised of simple specks of colour; but the object may have been much more noticeable when it was originally painted, especially when one takes into consideration Whistler's pen drawing of 1888 and a photograph published in 1892. The Nocturnes attempt to engage and challenge the viewer, for in Whistler's visions of the night, one is rarely assured of

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