Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach

James McNeill Whistler's 'Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach' belongs to his groundbreaking series of Nocturnes — night views of the Thames painted from his Chelsea home that transformed their subjects into near-abstract arrangements of tonal color. Battersea Reach, opposite Chelsea, provided the industrial yet atmospheric backdrop for many of these works: the dark shapes of factory buildings and chimneys against a luminous river surface, the whole dissolved into blue and silver gradations that pushed representation to its limits. Whistler named these works after musical forms to assert their right to be judged as pure aesthetic experience rather than topographic description. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston holds this as a prime example of his Nocturne series.

Whistler's Nocturne technique involves thinning his paint with copal medium to a fluid, almost watercolor-like consistency, laying it in broad washes to create the deep blue-silver tonality. Forms are simplified to silhouettes and reflections. The picture is typically built quickly to capture the atmospheric unity of the night scene before analysis destroys it.