Only 2 Hours From Penn Square: Whistler Like You’ve Never Seen Him

The Freer-Sackler Galleries, side-by-side repositories of the Smithsonian's Asian art collection, also house one of the finest and largest gatherings of work by James McNeill Whistler, the American-born painter who decamped for London where he advanced the radical vision of JMW Turner toward the flowering of 20th Century abstraction.

James McNeill Whistler
1834-1903

 Now through Aug. 17 in the Sackler is the landmark Whistler exhibition, "An American in London: Whistler and the Thames."   Brought together for the first time US and UK collections are some 80 of Whistler's London scenes -- many centered on the great city's great arterial waterway. 

This exhibition is the most significant showing of Whistler in more than two decades.  For Lancastrians, it is a privileged opportunity for a day trip to Washington to experience one of the masters in full.

Arriving as a young man in London in 1859, having left West Point to study etching at the US Geodetic Survey and painting in Paris, Whistler was very much a contemporary of Dickens: steeped in the novelist’s remorseless portrayal of London's squalor, inequalities and virile industrial tumult.  But no Victorian moralist was he -- rather, Whistler's concern was all form, light and color, the very elements that soon would come to define the modernist revolution he prefigures.

Nocturne -- Blue and Silver

Like Turner -- as well as Monet -- he explores the misty, indistinct and impermanent vistas of the riverscape with restrained emotion.  He also brings to life the seedy and roguish characters of the waterfront, as in “Wapping”, a Renoir-like pub scene of two sailors and a lady weighing her options, with the daily commotion of the docks and river spread out behind them.

Wapping

By contrast, a corner of the gallery space is given to work displaying Whistler's fascination (as with the West, generally) with all things Japanese.  He sets pastel-colored proper English women in geisha poses -- complete with kimono and chrysanthemum -- on a balcony overlooking the grey river and the looming charcoal tones of Battersea on the opposite shore.  He even signs the work with a butterfly icon.

Balcony

To complete the contrast, the gallery offers through July 27 a companion exhibition, much smaller in scale, of Kobayashi Kiyochika woodblock prints of Tokyo scenes from the same period. 

Whistler’s great London works challenged the Victorian establishment, and he ultimately fled England for the continent in disgust at the negative critical reception he received. As this stunning display of virtuosity confirms, Whistler’s detractors were shortsighted: his work endures for the ages.

Battersea Reach

Get up and go:

The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, located at 1050 Independence Avenue S.W., and the adjacent Freer Gallery of Art, located at 12th Street and Independence Avenue S.W., are on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (closed Dec. 25), and admission is free. The galleries are located near the Smithsonian Metrorail station on the Blue and Orange lines. For more information about the Freer and Sackler galleries and their exhibitions, programs and other public events, visit www.asia.si.edu. For general Smithsonian information, call (202) 633-1000

This is the final venue of a three-stop tour for this exhibition.  Don’t miss it.