Music And Painting

Matthew Sturgis is captivated by an exhibition that explores the late-Victorian master’s revolutionary attitude towards the natural world.

NATURE,’ Whistler liked to declare, ‘is usually wrong.’ It was one of several bold and provocative things he said on the subject to a Victorian public ready to accept as ‘sublime’ every ‘foolish’ sunset they encountered. He allowed that Nature contained ‘the elements, in colour and form, of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music’. However, he would admonish: ‘to say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.’

This fascinating show—boldly, perhaps provocatively, entitled ‘Whistler and Nature’—shows how Whistler himself played that ‘piano’ with wonderful subtlety and grace. there are 100 pieces in all media: oil paintings, drawings, etchings and sketchbooks.

The scenes to which he was drawn, as the exhibition reveals, were not the wild terrains of the romantic imagination, but landscapes tamed by human intervention: parklands, industrial waterfronts, bridge-spanned rivers and, indeed, paved streets and close interiors. Nature as a resource and a refuge. Venice Whistler loved, and depicted, as a city that had tamed even the sea.