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Nocturne in Black & Gold: The Falling Rocket

By Subir Roychowdhury
ames McNeill Whistler was born in Lowel, Massachusetts, in 1834. In 1843, the Whistler family moved to Russia but following his father’s death six years later, Whistler returned home. In 1851, he joined the Military Academy at West Point, but to his dismay, soon found regimented life burdensome. His impatience and intolerance ultimately saw him sacked from the services. A year and a half later, he left for Paris determined and destined to become a painter, and attended Gleyre’s courses. Though in 1863, Whistler exhibited at the Salon des Refuses alongside other impressionists, he was not so much interested in the effects of light as in the harmonies of neutral tones and arrangements of colour patterns, Whistler was an eccentric, egoistical person who wore fanciful outfits yet was very sensitive and introspective, and his paintings reflect his personality. They are delicate, refined and polished; concerned more with sentiment than with full-bodied emotion. Often in his paintings, he takes a solo theme and weaves it into delicate harmonies that render a superb monochromatic effect as evident in paintings like ‘The White Girl’ (1863) and ‘The Old Bridge at Battersea’ (1872-75). Whistler eventually moved to London, befriended Rosetti and Swinburne, came in contact with the pre-Raphaelities and later became one of the key figures in the English aesthetic movement. The artist died an expatriate in London in 1903.

Nocturne in Black & Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875): Oil on wood (50.5 x 46.5 cm), Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, USA, is a breathtaking picture of a firework display in all its luminosity and iridescence similar to the firework display that took place in the famous entertainment park in London (Cremorne Gardens). The initial reaction to this work was one of outrage but art historian Craig Staff had this to say: “It is relatively easy to appreciate why Nocturne would have proved such a provocative painting. Rather than organise the painting around some form of figure/ground relation, Whistler instead creates an indeterminate pictorial impression given through the incandescent glow of the fireworks themselves. Without any overt figurative reference, Nocturne instead appears entirely abstract.”

In 1877, when this picture was first exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, John Ruskin accused it of being a “pot of paint swung at the face of the public”. A furious Whistler instantly slapped a suit for slander against Ruskin. Whistler forcefully defended his work and by logical extension, the set of values and belief that Nocturne stood for – that art was essentially independent and autonomous and hence not limited by its responsibility to inscribe a ‘lifelike’ effect. His views were similar to those of French impressionist Edgar Degas who, while defending the painting ‘A bar at the Follies Bergere’ by Edouard Manet, had this comment to make: “A painting is an artificial work existing outside nature and it requires as much knavery, trickery and deceit as the perpetration of a crime.” In this hard-fought, high-profile libel trial, Whistler was ultimately awarded one farthing in damages. Even though the sum was a trivial and token one, it catapulted the painting into a prominence that eventually led to the development of an abstract model of painting during the late 19th century. All in all, Nocturne in Black and Gold is indeed a 24-carat canvas.