In “Looking and Feeling,” columnist Weili Jin ’28 explores form, rhythm and emotional valence in works of art from across the globe.

Few artworks offer me as much calm and solace as James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Nocturne in Blue and Silver, Chelsea” (1871).

It’s not a large painting, measuring only 50 centimeters in height and 60 in width. At the Tate Britain, where it’s displayed alongside mythological bronze sculptures and provocative portraits, it can be easy to miss.

But the painting’s details — and especially its colors — are nothing short of marvelous. It’s a snapshot of London’s River Thames by moonlight, framed by sky and shore, lined by houses in the distance and anchored by a lone fisherman with his boat in the foreground. 

It’s a paean of praise for the color blue: Whistler uses a minimalist palette of oils largely restricted to bluish shades. It’s signed, too, with Whistler’s signature butterfly, marked on a wooden post on the riverbank.

To me, every shade of blue used in this painting takes on an individual character. Take, for instance, the cold azure-gray of Whistler’s sky. Compare that to the darker blue of the city skyline below, which seems to me an unwelcome contrast — a nearly oppressive stripe of noise and intensity running across the canvas, peppered with speckles of light that are mirrored in the water. 

But this patch of urban murk is brief: it soon gives way, through a gradient of hues, to the luminosity of the Thames. 

Much of the river water is lightened with a refreshing, almost metallic pale blue, lending a sense of purity and clarity in equal measure. (This metallic quality also gives rise to the figurative use of “silver” in the work’s title, which was adopted by art historians after the fact. Whistler’s original title was “Nocturne in Blue-Green.”) 

Some sections of water are accented with striped hints of darker blue. The lower third of the picture, meanwhile — where the fisherman stands with his barge — looks partly shrouded in a nostalgic purple mist, making the figure appear translucent and hazy, like a distant memory. 

On a microscopic level, then, the nuances between each kind of blue each reflect a unique emotional valence. Some are somber, some wistful, others regal and still others hopeful. In this sense, Whistler’s “Nocturne” takes a common theme — blue — and dissects it into so many variations that it defamiliarizes it. That defamiliarization can offer an unexpected yet necessary perspective in a world where so much is taken for granted.

But I’m interested to consider these blues macroscopically, too, at a slight remove from the niceties of shade and hue. Whistler’s affective, visible brushwork echoes those found in Chinese and Japanese ink wash painting, which enjoyed great popularity in late 19th-century Europe. Each stroke of blue is thus broad and sweeping. From a distance, they weave in and out of each other, evoking the fluidity of air and water. 

If I let my eyes relax and unfocus, Whistler’s broad brushstrokes become mobile, amorphous, wholly enveloping my visual field. I see thick, rhythmic swaths of paint melting together, joining one another like water in motion. I hear that water gently lapping against the sand onshore — rising and receding, as if the Thames was breathing. 

What were initially two-dimensional fields of blue now gain dimension and volume; like in a Rothko painting, they begin to expand, contract, swim, pulsate. At once, the colors in Whistler’s composition come to life. 

At some point, lost in Whistler’s colors, I forget that there’s a city in the background — its lights suggested by blurry dots of paint.

Indeed, a cursory glance at the picture might initially suggest a rural or pastoral setting, but as the title suggests, Whistler places us across the river from Chelsea, a neighborhood in central London. In the day, the horizon would transform into the epitome of noisy, high-end metropolitan bustle. It’s startling, then, to see Chelsea so tranquil in the moonlight. 

The Thames also takes on a gentle, magical sheen — the very quality that inspired Whistler in 1871 to paint his “Nocturnes” series, of which this is the first. He succeeded, I think, in capturing the poignancy and serenity of a city asleep with the meditative rhythm one finds in Chopin’s musical nocturnes. There’s a profound stillness in the picture that offers a powerful conceptual counterpoint to the chaos of urban life, as seen in works like Julie Mehretu’s “story-maps.”

Biographies of Whistler attest that, to produce these “Nocturnes,” Whistler would go out by the Thames to take in the scenery with a friend at night. He and his friend would exchange descriptions of what they saw, distilling the imagery into its sensual and visual essence. The following day, Whistler would then translate this essence into paint. I find his process beautiful and striking. In this way, Whistler’s painting constitutes a poetic act of remembering. “Nocturne in Blue and Silver, Chelsea” is a reproduction of a memory — of something hazy, dreamlike and incompletely defined, not unlike the shimmering silvery-blue water in the composition itself.