A series of nocturnes brought a lot of frustration and heartache to American painter James Abbot McNeill Whistler. Why couldn’t people just enjoy art for the sake of it?

Between the 1870s and mid-1890s, Whistler worked on a series of landscape paintings of the Thames river in London. Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea is the first Nocturne in the series of landscapes by the infamously misunderstood American artist. These abstract, nocturnal visions went against the contemporary fashion of painting and fell in with the mantra of “Art for art’s sake.”

This painting might well have been a view from Whistler's couch, as the artist had a home in Chelsea, and across from it were the banks of the Thames. The inspiration behind Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea came with Whistler’s arrival to Westminster via steamer one evening in August of 1871. Whistler used the musical term "nocturne" to title his paintings, believing music to be the poetry of sound. In music, a nocturne is a composition, typically for piano, that is meant to be evocative of the feelings of nighttime. Nocturnes tend to be somewhat pensive, and that rightly sums up Whistler's series. What a nocturne painting represents is dependent on who is looking at it, Whistler once told a judge. 

This didn’t play well in the art world. The painting’s lack of detail verging on abstraction was an apparent insult to the city of London. Stomping through the artistic fashion scene were the Pre-Raphaelites, and Whistler’s abstract images did not cut it with them. Famous Whistler hater John Ruskin criticized Whistler for asking for “two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Ooouuch! Ruskin treated Whistler as though he painted poo on canvas. Meanwhile, the painting depicts an ordinary scene of a fisherman standing on the banks of Battersea, London, all but evaporating amid the elements of nature (air, water, sand). Whistler opted to go against convention because he wanted to paint poetic scenes of “palaces in the night.” Can you really blame a guy for wanting to transform the mundane of the urban world into visual gold? I say nay! Paint on, Whistler, for your palaces have a place in this world.