Whislter Dispelled. (3rd April 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Day, James
• Is Part Of: Konsthistorisk tidskrift. Volume 87:Number 2(2018)
• Page Start: 65
• Page End: 82
• Publication Date: 2018-04-03
• Subjects: Art -- Periodicals; Kunstgeschiedenis (wetenschap); Kunst; Electronic journals; 705
• DOI: 10.1080/00233609.2017.1369157
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0023-3609

Abstract

Summary: During the 1870s, Whistler painted several night-time pictures of the industrialising banks of the Thames at Chelsea and Battersea. This part of the river was being transformed during the period by the building of Joseph Bazzelgate's embankment (1871–1874), tangle of railway lines at Battersea and population boom on the South side. Painting and etching close to his Cheyne Walk home, Whistler largely ignores the modernisation of the river, depicting the rickety wooden structure of Old Battersea Bridge and manual labour like that carried out by the Thames watermen. By situating the Nocturnes within the campaign to free the Metropolitan bridges from the toll and the dangerous passage lightermen had to navigate under Battersea Bridge, this article suggests that Whistler's aestheticism remained tied to the social history of the river. After a survey of post-war art-historical accounts of the Nocturnes as (a) avant-garde negation of Victorian pictorial convention and (b) flight into the hermetic sphere of art for art's sake, it is suggested that the withdrawal from social comment in Whistler's painting amounts to a disengagement from the intellectual presuppositions of socially progressive 'work'.