Down by the Riverside

Finally getting going in 2014; I’m now beginning to accumulate a backlog of exhibitions to write about, which is not what was supposed to happen at all.  I seem to be suffering from a kind of writer’s block on getting down to the job- thanks, Tina, for prodding me into completing this entry….

At the head of the queue demanding my attention is the Dulwich Gallery’s show about James MacNeill Whistler and the role that the River Thames played in his art- this has closed in south London but it’s coming to Amherst, Massachusetts and the Smithsonian in Washington, if any of my transatlantic readers are interested.    This came labelled as “An American in London”, which struck me as a slightly debateable title given that I’m not sure just how “American” Whistler actually was by the time he created most of the art on display.   Admittedly he was born in Lowell, Massachusetts but he spent most of his childhood in Europe (particularly Russia) where his father was involved in railway engineering – which gives him an unexpected link to Giorgio de Chirico, also the son of a nomadic railway engineer.   In reality Whistler lived less than a decade of his life in the US.  He put in three mediocre years at West Point Military Academy before being thrown out for failing a chemistry test- the last straw which finally persuaded the college authorities that the US Army could well do without the young man’s services.   By a strange twist, one of his classmates was a certain Marcus Reno, later to play a controversial role in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The two men had been friends at West Point and remained on letter writing terms for many years afterwards.   I can’t imagine Whistler ever ending up facing a court martial accused of excessive passivity in the face of the enemy; though; if he had ended up in the ranks of the Seventh Cavalry he’d probably have got his command wiped out by reckless over aggression (assuming his men didn’t shoot him first…).

After West Point, Whistler (still trading on his father’s connections as a military man?) spent a few months with the US Coastal Survey before leaving for France to pursue his art in 1855.   In 1859 he moved on to London (not least because he saw better chances of artistic recognition and sales prospects there).  Though he travelled widely thereafter, getting as far afield as Chile, and never gave up his foothold in France, he clearly came to regard the city as his home.  When forced into short term exile in Venice after going spectacularly bankrupt as a result of his ill-advised legal action against the critic John Ruskin (notoriously he won the verdict but the jury, which probably felt the case should never have gone to court, awarded him a farthing damages without costs), he felt homesick for London and came back as soon as he decently could.  He never seems to have thought of heading back to the USA to lick his wounds and wait for the dust to settle.   Above all, it seems revealing that, despite a West Point background which would more or less have guaranteed him commissioned rank, there is no suggestion that he ever considered crossing the Atlantic to fight (presumably for the Union) in the Civil War.   This suggests a rather detached view of his native land, to say the least. 

In other words, I don’t think Whistler’s art reflects a particularly “American” eye view of the River Thames; if anything, he came to be a London insider fairly rapidly, while on an artistic level the influence of 17^th century Dutch art, and later of Japanese prints, was far more relevant to his work than any American input.

The exhibition’s basic layout was a combination of chronological and geographical, reflecting the fact that Whistler’s depictions of the river tended to move upstream over time.  He started out in the bustling and at times rather dangerous world of the docks down east in Wapping and Rotherhithe, moved to the rapidly gentrifying environs of Chelsea in the 1860’s where he remained (albeit at a series of different addresses) for much of the rest of his life.   There were some rather awkward shifts in this approach- a series of lithographs from late in his career when he was staying in the Savoy Hotel with his terminally ill wife were slotted in the middle of the show rather out of chronological sequence - but the general structure more or less worked, especially as the geographical shifts correlated quite well with Whistler’s own changing style.

I hadn’t been aware that Whistler, in addition to his large scale works in oils, was such a prolific creator of engravings and other forms of graphic art.  He first made his name with a series of engravings of riverside scenes, mostly in and around the London docks, and throughout his artistic career sale of his graphic works brought in a fair share of his income.   The early engravings are wonderfully detailed and keenly observed (Whistler was an almost obsessive tinkerer with the plates until he got just the effects he wanted when the print was made).    They give a real sense of the vitality of the district- and the distinctly crumbling nature of many of the buildings backing on to the busy highway of the river.   This was a part of London which enjoyed a pretty lurid reputation as a place of crime and vice; there isn’t much explicit sign of that in the engravings, though it’s intriguing that one of them was drawn in the yard of the River Police station and it’s been suggested that the boatmen and dock workers who appear in the foreground of some of the views were in fact Whistler’s hired minders making sure that the well-dressed outsider wasn’t mugged as he took his preparatory sketches.  Whistler appears to have rather enjoyed the rough side of life in places like Wapping and the first painting to establish him as a rising star was also created in this period- see top.  Painted in a pub with a splendid view over the apparently chaotic hustle and bustle of the river, a woman enjoys a drink with a couple of men.   The female model is Jo Hiffernan/Heffernan (both spellings were used), Whistler’s Irish-born model and, living up to artistic stereotype, mistress.   The painting was originally supposed to cast her pretty unambiguously as a dockside prostitute with a client and her pimp; intriguingly Whistler reworked the painting to make her look a lot more “respectable” at the last minute before submission to the Royal Academy for hanging in the Summer Exhibition.   Perhaps he thought he might have trouble getting a work which was light on overt moralistic content past the Royal Academy jury as the “fallen woman” was not obviously on the way to appropriate punishment for her immorality. The result was a work which rather puzzled the critics, who couldn’t work out what the “story” it illustrated might be.    Jo also appeared in the exhibition, away from the river but carrying a Japanese fan and looking particularly lovely- see below.

In the 1860’s Whistler moved up river to Chelsea, which remained his London base for the rest of his life.  His redoubtable mother came for lengthy stays (Jo was packed off out of the way) and was rather put out by catching her son painting on the Sabbath in a grave departure from New England rectitude.  The river here was still a busy working highway, but not in quite the same way as in the East End docklands.   Barges and lighters plied the river as part of the transport networks linked to the docks for imports and exports, small steamers provided passenger transport to and from the City of London and watermen still ferried passengers up, down and across the river (in the 1860’s all the bridges apart from Westminster Bridge were subject to quite steep tolls even for pedestrian traffic and the public transport network was in its infancy).   Chelsea was a place in flux.  It had been a village out to the west of Westminster, popular in the 16^th and 17^th centuries with those well enough off to own their own barges to ferry them to the royal palace at Whitehall or all the way to the City.   Shifts in favoured royal residences away from the riverside and London’s inexorable creep westwards in the 17^th and 18^th centuries had meant that the wealthy moved elsewhere, leaving a lot of crumbling old buildings, near-slums and small industrial properties.   Its even more down market counterpart on the south bank of the Thames, Battersea, was also full of industry- and the last survivor of the grand commercial pleasure gardens which had dominated the area in the 18^th century.  Cremorne Gardens, however, had a pretty louche reputation.  By the mid-19^th century however, Chelsea was on its way back up again as it became fashionable with artists and writers, partly due to grand scale urban and riverside redevelopment (of which more later).   Perhaps the general loucheness and bohemian air imparted by Cremorne and the old riverside pubs helped too.

Whistler obviously relished the area.  His painting style slowly shifted away from the very detailed depictions in his early works to something much more loose and proto-impressionistic, with hazy washes of colour conveying a strong sense of atmosphere and steadily blurring the factories and boatyards of the riverside into a more generic shimmer.  It was during this period that he developed his mature style, with titles marked by musical references (“nocturnes”, “harmonies”) and a clear preference for moments when the bustle of the river was somewhat stilled (by ice floes, for instance) and late evening scenes with muted twilights and ghostly, half-seen, half-sensed objects.   On the way there, Whistler absorbed the influence of Japanese prints; this led to a few rather odd hybrids in which young women in faintly improbable orientalising costumes look out over a misty Thames and where Jo Hiffernan dresses up in a kimono.

The exhibition ended with a focus on one of his finest works from his Chelsea period, depicting Old Battersea Bridge in the twilight with a rocket from a display in Cremorne Gardens sparkling in the sky.   Though not the central exhibit in the Ruskin case in which Ruskin accused Whistler, in effect, of charging fancy prices for throwing a pot of paint in the eyes of the public and Whistler sued for libel, it was raised in the courtroom debates and Whistler was obliged to explain his thinking and methods.  The examination was quoted at some length.  I assume we as the 21^st century audience were being invited to feel very superior to the philistinism of the defence council but the discussion was actually very informative.   It was also intriguing to discover that Whistler was in the habit of writing very rude letters to early patrons or their children if he heard that they were selling his work on at a large profit; perhaps Ruskin had a point on the money side of things.

Old Battersea Bridge was a wonderfully ramshackle wooden affair dating from the 18^th century and something of a favourite subject for Whistler in his Chelsea years.  Of course this piece isn’t a photographically accurate depiction of the bridge (some photographs were included in the show) or even in line with sketches which he made of it on other occasions.   

In particular he gives it a far higher clearance over the river than the rather tunnel-like appearance which its arches appear to have had.  This is probably a case of art imitating art.  A wooden bridge in Edo much loved by artists like Hiroshige and Hokusai has something of the same air as Battersea but was much higher and more curved, more like the bridge of Whistler’s depiction.   The firework display also harked back to Japanese exemplars.

When he painted the bridge in the mid 1870’s, however, its days were numbered.  It was highly unpopular with river users due to the currents and eddies which its multiple piers created- getting past Battersea Bridge was always a far more dangerous process than the very calm progress of the lighter in the picture suggests.   The whole Thames waterside was undergoing massive changes thanks to Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s creation of the Thames Embankment as one element in his wider plans to create a modern sewerage system for London.  One result of the embanking process was that the river was somewhat narrowed and became faster flowing, meaning eventually that the bridges needed to be replaced.  This process was hastened by the passage of an Act of Parliament extinguishing the tolls; traffic on Battersea Bridge immediately increased to such an extent that it became unsafe and access had to be severely restricted (rather defeating the point of removing the tolls).   It was clear that the old bridge would have to go; demolition work started shortly afterwards.   Cremorne Gardens were also finally closed down by a coalition of moral reformers and property developers just after the painting was completed.    The work therefore acquired an air of nostalgia for a world about to pass away, which may not have been entirely intended-Whistler may have enjoyed the old but had no qualms about painting the new world of upper class respectability which developed along the Thames Embankment as the water colour below shows and to the very end of his artistic life the river was a favourite subject.  Nevertheless it made a very fitting climax to an exhibition which showed just how central London’s riverside was to Whistler’s development.