The Nature of Painting

Perspectives from The Artist’s Road

Nocturne in Black and Gold - The Falling Rocket J. A. M. Whistler

We have been reading Marc Simpson’s 2008 book, Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly, published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Clark Art Institute. It has provoked some lively studio discussions about the late work of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Dissatisfied with what he had learned from his teacher, Gustave Courbet, Whistler set out in 1867 to unlearn all he knew about painting and set himself on a new path of experimentation. In a letter to his friend Henri Fantin-Latour, he wrote, “That damned Realism made an immediate appeal to my vanity as a painter! . . .and then people went to see it! . . . canvases produced by a nobody puffed up with pride at showing off his splendid gifts to other painters . . .”

Simpson writes, “For over three years Whistler worked on creating a radical painting manner that integrated color, line, principles of Japanese a…