It is often said that one of the great unfairnesses in life is that bad people sometimes produce beautiful art. That is certainly true of James Abbott McNeill Whistler, one of the nineteenth century’s most influential painters. Living by the mantra of ‘art for art's sake,’ meant, in Whistler's case, not withdrawing from the world but hurling himself at it, fists flying. He called his autobiography The Gentle Art of Making Enemies and was careful to follow his own advice.

Friends and rivals could reckon on being emotionally beaten up by him, or else find themselves blackballed from their favourite members' club on his say-so. He ignored his roots in Lowell, Massachusetts, preferring people to believe he had been born in Russia, where his father had been an engineer; he first earned acclaim in 1863 in Paris, where he had worked with some of the city’s most avant-garde painters, including the realist champion Gustave Courbet. Whistler shocked the art establishment that same year when his ‘Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl,’ (1862) featuring his mistress (and Courbet’s ex) Joanna Hiffernan, was exhibited at the city’s Salon des Refusés.

‘Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl,’ (1862)

Many critics found indecent and incomprehensible his forthright image of a woman with her hair down, standing on a wolf’s pelt with flowers discarded at her feet. Whistler relished the controversy and courted opportunities for scandal throughout his career.

His only trip to Venice came at the close of another such episode. Still Britain’s leading art critic in 1870s, John Ruskin, had accused Whistler of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public's face,’ when his ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket,’ (1875) an account of the sky above Cremorne Gardens in London during a fireworks display,

*‘Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket*,’

Typically, Whistler sued Ruskin for libel in 1878, and while he won his case, he was awarded only a farthing in damages. the need to pay substantial legal costs left him bankrupt, and in consequence he threw himself into accepting commissions to dig himself out of a hole. He put his talent to work and took on a project from London’s Fine Art Society to produce a series of prints of Venice.

Whistler arrived in Venice in September 1879 with his mistress Maud Franklin, it was supposed to be a trip of a few weeks but they remained there for 14 months; the city proved both restorative and transforming for him, it released a flood of creativity that enabled him to re-establish his finances, his reputation, and to a certain degree his personal life.

For his subject matter, Whistler all but ignored the famous canal views and attractions preferring instead to depict lesser-known corners of the city, such as the crumbling little houses and back canals. It was during this trip Whistler redefined his style in his etchings and pastels. He simplified his works and focused on the shadows he saw within the city's structures.

As a result, his work became more abstract and dependent upon a minimalist use of line and colour, what Whistler termed the Japanese method of drawing. The scientific, as he said, like all his systems, required him to find the exact spot where the focus of interest in the etching, lithograph, or watercolour was to be. Having selected the point of interest, he drew and completed this part of the picture. It might be a bridge, a window of a house, a doorway, or the sitter's head. Then he drew whatever came next in importance. But the most significant step was the placing of the subject. The procedure seems simple, but he used to say, 'The secret is in doing it.'

With this newfound minimalist aesthetic, Whistler applied his technique to all the mediums in which he created his pictures including ‘The Marble Palace,’ from 1880.

Whistler: how Venice transformed his style

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