A certain harmony of colour

Short and slight, monocle-wearing James McNeill Whistler was a dashing, combative character who sought parallels between music and painting, says Caroline Bugler

- Caroline Bugler

IN 1878, an extraordinary trial took place at the Old Bailey—one concerned not with crime, but with the very nature of art itself. The eminent critic John Ruskin had published an open letter the previous year in which he accused James McNeill Whistler of ‘Cockney impudence’ for having the temerity to ask 200 guineas for ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’. The canvas on which the pot of paint had allegedly been flung was Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which had gone on display at the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery in London. Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and won, although the award of one farthing damages did little to stave off his bankruptcy.

Whistler declared that his aim had been to ‘bring about a certain harmony of colour’, rather than to paint a particular subject. His evocation of fireworks exploding against the night sky may have been inspired by a scene he had witnessed over Cremorne Gardens on the Thames, but it could be taking place anywhere. The painting also looked unfinished, more like a sketch when compared with the painstaking execution of the highly detailed pictures by artists such as Edward BurneJones or William Powell Frith, to which the Victorian public was more accustomed.

Whistler’s journey to the point where he was obliged to defend his artistic philosophy in a courtroom had taken more than two decades. American by birth, he had a peripatetic childhood, moving from his birthplace in Massachusetts to St Petersburg in Russia, where his father worked on the railway, to London and back to Connecticut. His family wanted him to pursue a career in the priesthood or the military, but he had no religious vocation and a spell at America’s West Point Academy made it clear that he was not cut out to be a soldier. A gifted draughtsman, he was determined to be an artist.