Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge

Whistler painted this view of Old Battersea Bridge in the early 1870s, looking up at it across the Thames at dusk. The wooden bridge was over a hundred years old and rickety, and within a little over a decade it was pulled down and replaced by the iron one that still stands. So he caught it near the end of its life. He was also looking hard at Japanese prints just then, and it shows. The single tall pier rises out of the frame the way a bridge does in a Hiroshige woodcut, flattened and abstract, more a pattern of blue and gold than a record of a place. A faint spray of sparks drifts in the sky from fireworks at the pleasure gardens nearby. Whistler cared less about the bridge than about the mood of the hour, and he called these evening pictures nocturnes, borrowing the word from music.