Nocturne: Blau und Silber – Chelsea

This is the first of them. In August 1871 Whistler painted the Thames at dusk, looking from Battersea across to Chelsea, and reduced the whole scene to a few thin veils of blue and grey over a dark ground. You can just make out the tower of Chelsea Old Church on the right and a lone boatman below. Whistler wanted the picture to work the way music does, as an arrangement of colour and tone before it is a view of anything. It was his patron Frederick Leyland who handed him the word for it, nocturne, borrowed from the piano pieces of the day, and Whistler seized on it for the whole series that followed. One of his earliest patrons, W. C. Alexander, bought this first Nocturne the very next year.