Whistler and Illuminated Manuscripts

What connection, you might say, is there between the artist Whistler and illuminated manuscripts? Not much, I hear you answer. But there is almost as little connection between Whistler and Nature, and that is the title of a whole book – to be honest, a deeply disappointing book. Described as “published to accompany the exhibition” Whistler and Nature, it fails to explain how only a minority of the works in the exhibition are about nature, and yet makes clear how Whistler grew up in an environment of engineering and construction. His early landscapes include figures in the background erecting telephone cables, so clearly, he wasn’t striving for the traditional picturesque. Mention of the picturesque leads to a lengthy discussion of Capability Brown and William Kent that does not seem very relevant to Whistler. A claim is made that Whistler used the techniques of Gainsborough, which doesn’t seem very relevant either. More maddeningly, the book includes two of Whistler’s exquisite portraits, which are not discussed in any detail in the book. Why struggle to find links between Whistler and Nature, if he paints portraits as good as these? The book seems an object lesson in earnestly searching for themes in Whistler that are not the most fruitful ones for exploring what Whistler actually painted: urban landscapes, including industry and fog - when he wasn’t painting portraits. Some of those portraits, including At the Piano, 1858, are remarkable studies of adolescents.

The curator of the exhibition, and author of the bulk of the book, Patricia De Montfort claims in a rather over-elaborate way that Constable is depicting human industry in works like Dedham Lock (1820), and so, presumably, Whistler was following in a tradition of depicting industry in the picturesque landscape; I see the depiction of industry as accidental, not central to the theme of Constable’s painting, which in my opinion looks less like a study of human activity than a sense of nostalgia for a golden age; there is little industry in East Anglia.  Slightly more relevant is perhaps a Turner watercolour of Leeds, 1816, which certainly does appear to be a depiction of an industrial city, complete with smoke from chimneys. But surely the justification for Whistler’s Wapping is that the painter had grown up in a family of engineers, had studied at West Point, and liked the feel of activity and business from depicting working ships.

The real interest in Whistler is perhaps the series of Nocturnes (few if any of which appear in the exhibition), including the Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Bognor (1874). These paintings simplify their ostensible view dramatically, and reduce it to a dusk or night-time scene, including a few artificial lights enabling the view to be discerned. Of course, as modern viewers, we find it incredible that any art can be created in Bognor, or, for that matter, we don’t immediately think of urban Westminster as a site for art. That finding of beauty in the fog and the haze of a modern city, and reducing an image to broad, almost abstract masses of colour, is where Whistler becomes interesting – the painter of modern life, to use Baudelaire’s phrase. It is as if he was depicting a landscape in the manner of Howard Hodgkin or Ivon Hitchens, a hundred years before either of them.

As for figures in Whistler’s landscapes, Ms de Montfort quotes Whistler himself on the role of one of these figures:

My picture of a Harmony in Grey and Gold is an illustration of my meaning a snow scene with a single black figure and a lighted tavern. I care nothing for the past, present, or future of the black figure, placed there because black was wanted at that spot.

Unfortunately, the author fails to take this hint and spends two pages describing the “intellectual tradition of the figure in the landscape”. As Beckett would say, no meaning where none intended.

The final chapter of the book, by Clare Willsdon, makes a claim for Whistler as a painter of gardens. If art criticism could be described like the children’s game where you search for the subject and are either hot or cold, depending on how close you are, then this writing is very cold indeed. Certainly Whistler created some engravings set in gardens; his wife was a keen gardener, and the resulting images are unobjectionable, perfectly competent, but not very memorable. It’s not the Whistler I remember.