Catalogue: An American in London: Whistler and the Thames

American born, Paris-trained, absorbed by Eastern art, James McNeill Whistler has long enjoyed a reputation as a cosmopolitan artist. He lived for much of his career near the Thames, a favourite subject for more than 40 years.

Whistler has also become one of the most documented and written about artists of the 19th century. The ensuing tide of popular myth about him can be overwhelming for the modern-day researcher.

Interest in his art and ideas has continued into the 21st century and several exhibitions over the past few decades have offered new interpretations of his work (notably the Tate retrospective in 1994).

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, no exhibition has focused in-depth on Whistler’s time in London and his artistic relationship with the Thames, particularly crucial early experiments during the 1860s that produced major oils such as Wapping (1860-64).

This period was the test-bed of his Nocturnes paintings of the 1870s, which form a significant proportion of his body of work in oil and on paper.

Between 1994 and 2004, extensive new material about Whistler’s time in London surfaced through work at the University of Glasgow on a digital edition of his vast correspondence and, more recently, an online catalogue raisonné of his etchings.

It became clear that there was much more to be said about his Thames subjects, notably Old Battersea Bridge (which could be seen from his houses at Lindsey Row, now Cheyne Walk) and which he etched, painted and drew repeatedly.

Our exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (until 12 January 2014), seeks to fill this gap. The accompanying catalogue details ways in which London and the Thames, then undergoing massive sociological and physical change, became essential to the development of Whistler’s distinctive vision of the modern city.

The reproduction of close-up details of works such as Wapping, and Brown and Silver: Old Battersea Bridge (above) in the catalogue, invites readers to peer beneath the surface of Whistler’s outwardly serene images and encounter a busier, noisier and more complex Victorian London.

Sites are documented in the text and exhibition through maps and contemporary photographs of Old Battersea Bridge. There is an important group of photographs by Chelsea photographer James Hedderly recording the construction of the Embankment during the 1860s and its impact on the riverside community.

The choice of cover image – the early riverscape Grey and Silver: Old Battersea Reach, 1863, was chosen to emphasise the importance of Whistler’s early painted and etched images as the bedrock of his later, more abstract, visions of the Thames.

Patricia de Montfort is an art historian at the University of Glasgow and the co-curator of An American in London: Whistler and the Thames