Whistler's Nocturnes

Bridging the Culture Gap: Retitling Whistler’s “Nocturnes”

Rachel Power, Princeton Class of 2008

“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat” — Kipling

Written in 1889, these opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of the East and West” express an opinion of these two spheres as discrete and unbridgeable cultural entities. However, Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Old Battersea Bridge, completed not two decades earlier by the artist James McNeil Whistler at the height of the Japanese Craze in Europe, directly opposes this claim. Representing instead a fusion of Japan and London on canvas, Nocturne: Blue and Gold is symbolic of the artist’s impulse to bring together East and West in his paintings. Though ostensibly a depiction of a well-known London landscape overlooking the Thames, the work bears considerable similarity to a number of woodblock prints by the Japanese artist, Hiroshige. In fact, Nocturne: Blue and Gold is but one of a series of “moonlights” that Whistler began in 1866 and which mirror Hiroshige’s prints by combining Eastern and Western stylistic and thematic elements. The titles of the works in this series testify to Whistler’s attempt to bring together two cultures on canvas — to find Japan in the West and to see the West as Japan. Unto each “moonlight,” Whistler bestowed a formulaic two-part title of the form Nocturne: Blue and Gold or Nocturne in Blue and Gold. The “Nocturne” portion of the title seems to be a reference to the convention of French Romantic painters to relate art to music, whereas the latter portion of the titles is a reference to the Hiroshige’s binary color scheme that Whistler employed in creating his “moonlights.” By conferring a double title that references both Eastern styles of painting and Western styles of music on his works, Whistler hoped to make explicit the duality of his artistic influences and to communicate his artistic motivation to bridge the gap between East and West.

However, Whistler’s “moonlights” do not encompass the scope that he attributes to them in entitling them to suggest Western parallels between art and music. The “Nocturne” portion of the title actually refers to the idea of art as “purely aesthetic,” which is Japanese in origin. The musical reference thus seems extemporized — a side note — and detracts from the central theme of the works: the use of Japanese styles of painting by a Western artist to illustrate the beauty of London nights. As a Westerner using Japanese styles of painting and artistic theories, Whistler’s motivation to bring together East and West was already clear. As such, he needlessly drew on Western concepts in titling his pieces, using the “Nocturne” to underscore an idea that existed already in Japanese art — the view of art as purely decorative and aesthetically valuable — and thus succeeded only in obscuring the focus of his works. To truly represent the Japanese essence of the “Nocturnes,” Whistler would have done better to stick with his original title of “moonlights.”

Table of Contents

Whistler's Japonisme
Hiroshige's Influence
The "Nocturne"
Bridging the Gap
The "Moonlight"
Works Cited
About the Author

The Gallery

Painting the Night
Hiroshige as a Landscapist
Whistler v. Ruskin
"Starry Nights" and "Moonlights"