Harmony in Blue and Pearl: The Sands, Dieppe

James McNeill Whistler's 1885 view of the beach at Dieppe — rendered as a 'Harmony in Blue and Pearl' — belongs to a series of small panel paintings of coastal subjects that he made during summers in France. Whistler was fascinated by the abstract potential of beach and sea subjects, where the horizontal divisions of sand, water, and sky could be reduced to pure tonal and color relationships. These small marine panels are among his most purely formal works, anticipating the color-field concerns of 20th-century painting through their radical reduction of subject to chromatic and tonal essentials.

Whistler reduces the Dieppe beach to a horizontal arrangement of tonal values — the pearl of wet sand, the blue of sea and sky, the faint verticalities of distant figures. Paint is applied thinly and with exquisite control, the surface barely covering the panel. The tonal range is restricted to a whisper of blue, gray, and pearl-white.