James McNeill Whistler: Artistic Style & Methods

Whistler's teacher Charles Gleyre impressed on him that line came before colour and that black was the foundation of tonal harmony, and the lesson shows in everything from his first copperplates to his last portraits. His etchings are built on economy: in the Thames plates of 1859 the wharves and warehouses of Black Lion Wharf or Rotherhithe are drawn with dense, almost documentary precision in the middle distance while the foreground dissolves into a few strokes, a device that pulls the eye to the working river. He often combined etching with drypoint, scratching directly into the copper for a soft, burred line, and the archive's many impressions of the same subject reflect his habit of reworking plates through successive states.

Venice changed the method. Rather than describing the monuments, the plates of 1879-80 - The Doorway, The Palaces, The Little Mast, the lagoon views - frame fragments of the city and leave large passages of paper bare. Whistler also inked his own plates selectively, leaving a film of ink on the copper to tint water and shadow, so that individual impressions of The Doorway or Nocturne differ in atmosphere. The result treats the printed sheet as a tonal composition rather than a reproduction of the plate.

In painting he pursued the same tonal unity with thin, fluid paint, laying in near-monochrome harmonies of grey, blue and gold. His titles were deliberately musical - symphonies, harmonies, arrangements and nocturnes - to insist that subject mattered less than the relation of colour and form; even the portrait of his mother was exhibited as an Arrangement in Grey and Black. The full-length portraits in the archive, from Sir Henry Irving as Philip II to Théodore Duret, set a single figure against a shallow, darkened space in a manner that owes much to Velázquez, whom Whistler admired.

Whistler took up lithography in the late 1870s with the London printer Thomas Way, first in lithotints - washes brushed onto the stone, as in the 1878 Nocturne of the Thames at Battersea - and later, from the late 1880s, in transfer lithographs drawn on paper and transferred to stone. These late prints of shopfronts, Paris gardens, draped models and portraits such as Stéphane Mallarmé are as spare as his etchings. Japanese woodblock prints and Asian ceramics shaped his flattened spaces, cropped compositions and decorative signature: from the 1860s he signed with a stylised butterfly monogram, later given a stinging tail.