American Art Collaborative

Whistler began making his “nocturnes”—abstract nighttime riverscapes that he named after a type of musical composition—in the early 1870s. This nocturne, a Venice subject, demonstrates Whistler’s innovative approach to printmaking. When he wiped the copper plate, he left behind ink to evoke watery shadows and an atmospheric sky. A contemporaneous critic protested that this work “can hardly be called, as it stands, an etching; the bones as it were of the picture have been etched, which bones consist of some shipping and distant objects, and then over the whole of the plate ink has apparently been smeared. We have seen a great many representations of Venetian skies, but never saw one before consisting of brown smoke with clots of ink in diagonal lines.”