Nocturne in Blue and Silver

The far bank here is Battersea, seen at dusk from Lindsey Row in Chelsea, the riverside terrace where Whistler lived in the early 1870s. That shore was industrial. The chimneys and the dark mound on the skyline belong to the works along the river, among them the slag heap of a plumbago works, where graphite was processed, and the single spire is Battersea Church. Whistler later said he completed the mass of the picture in one day. Traces of three chimneys and a spire, upside down at the lower left, suggest he first began it with the picture the other way up. He gave it to Frances Leyland, the wife of his patron, and by November 1872 it was hanging at the Leylands' house, Speke Hall near Liverpool. In 1877 it was shown at the new Grosvenor Gallery in London, listed right after the fireworks nocturne that provoked the critic John Ruskin. At the libel trial that followed in 1878, the critic William Michael Rossetti, speaking for Whistler, called this one a very artistic and beautiful representation of the pale blue moonlight.