James McNeill Whistler - Trouville. Gray and Green, the Silver Sea 1865
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Trouville. Gray and Green, the Silver Sea 1865
51x76cm oil/canvas
Art Institute of Chicago
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From Art Institute of Chicago:
In the early 1860s, James McNeill Whistler began to develop an art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, eschewing narrative or naturalistic details to focus more intently on formal concerns. In 1865 the artist traveled to Trouville, a French resort town, where he painted with Gustave Courbet and experimented with a series of increasingly simplified seascapes. The spare composition of this work—consisting solely of a broad expanse of water, a narrow swath of sky, and four delicate sailboats that break the high horizon line—reveals Whistler’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints and the new models they offered for the construction of painted space and depth.