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"The Thames In Ice", 1860, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas.
Whistler moved to London in 1859, where he took lodgings near the river Thames. The Thames rarely froze, but was clogged with ice for much of the unusually harsh winter of 1860-61, Whistler apparently completed this painting in three days, working from the balcony of an inn located across the Thames from his rooms in Wapping. When Whistler exhibited the painting at the Royal Academy in 1862, a newspaper reviewer praised its "murky, mournful, gloomy feeling." |