An American in London: Whistler and the Thames by Margaret F. MacDonald and Patricia de Montfort (review)

James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s father was a railway engineer who oversaw the construction of the St. Petersburg to Moscow railway in the 1840s. James (1834–1903), his son, who became the esteemed American artist, received an international art education enrolling in art classes at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, studying drawing with Hudson River School painter Robert W. Weir (1803–1889) at the United States Military Academy (West Point), and learning to etch in the drawing division of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey in the early 1850s. In 1855 he moved to Paris where he joined the circle of modernist artists and writers Courbet, Baudelaire, and Fantin-Latour and then relocated to London in 1859 to live alongside the Thames River on what is now Cheyne Walk (Chelsea) for forty years. Here Whistler drew, etched, and painted the river he loved, providing us with a lively social commentary on life along the transportation nucleus as well as a motif on which to build his evolving aesthetic style.

An American in London: Whistler and the Thames, is an enduring volume, accompanying an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London (16 October 2013–12 January 2014), the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts (1 February–13 April 2014) and the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (2 May–17 August 2014). The curator/authors, Margaret F. MacDonald and Patricia de Montfort, art scholars at the University of Glasgow, have done a magnificent job of assembling a significant display of Whistler’s Thames works accompanied by solid art historical and historical research that will make the volume a valuable reference for years to come.

Whistler devoted forty years to painting the Thames, especially concentrating on the subject between 1859 and 1879 while he resided at numbers 2 and 7 Lindsey Row, Chelsea. During this time he depicted the industrializing river from the Pool of London below Limehouse to the Chelsea Reach, plying the river on various river vessels and documenting the inhabitants of the river who laboured there. We see wharfingers, warehousemen, fishers, sailors, ship’s boys, publicans, (naval) pensioners, mudlarks, lime-burners, coal-heavers, bargees, and artisans, as well as other working men, women, and children.

The cast of characters is seen alongside numerous river craft including barques, barges, tugboats, wherries, steamers, schooners, oyster smacks, sail boats, skiffs, colliers, coal heavers, rowing boats, paddle steamers, passenger ferries, yawls, and all manners of sculls. As these lists suggest, Whistler illustrated the maritime life and literacy of the inhabitants of the river at a time when the river was the central hub for people in all the major cities of the world. This was a time when those who inhabited the river spoke the dual languages of modernity and tradition as they observed the transition of the river from oar and sail to steam. In this volume, we witness the spectacle of pedestrians traversing the river and its bridges gradually give way to the visage of mass transportation in the form of passenger steam ferries and steam trains.

Along with the river, bridges feature as another central motif for Whistler as perilous 18th-century wooden bridges give way to 19th-century stone and iron bridges. Patricia de Montfort has done excellent scholarship on the redevelopment of the Thames in her essay, “Painting River Pictures.” We learn that in the 1860s all but two of the old bridges (Blackfriars and London Bridge) were privately owned toll bridges. Following a public bridges movement and passage of the Metropolitan Toll Bridges Act in 1877, the tolls were removed and many of the bridges passed into the hands of the London Metropolitan Board of Works. There was much jubilation at the toll-freeing ceremonies, and a subsequent increase in the volume of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, giving cause for some of the older bridges to...