Existing comment:
"Nocturne: Blue and Silver -- Bognor," 1871-76, by James McNeill Whistler, oil on canvas.
Bognor is a fishing village in West Sussex, near Selsey Bill, to the west of Brighton. The author of an 1876 review was probably thinking of this painting when he noted that Whistler had recently completed a new "study" of "moonlight on the sea." It "presents a wide stretch of quiet water, with a few fishing-boats pushing out from the shore. A perfect stillness controls the scene, save where the tide, rippling in upon the sand, catches with its movement the white shine of the moon. One little wing-like cloud hovers above a sea of intensest blue, which seems to reflect and to contain the fairer tones of the star-lit blue sky." Freer thought that "Bognor" was one of Whistler's greatest nocturnes. |