The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island

Chapter 8. ‘‘Strange Beauty in the Night’’: Whistler’s Nocturnes of Cremorne Gardens

Chapter  ‘‘Strange Beauty in the Night’’: Whistler’s Nocturnes of Cremorne Gardens anne koval It is the surprises and paradoxes of beauty in realism that he [Whistler] loves; he wagers to find charm in the modern town and modern fashion; a fairy vision at night from squalid facts, the fiery jewelry that is the accident of a vulgar fete, chimneys that are like campaniles, phantoms of moderns that are almost like princes. —D. S. MacColl, Nineteenth Century Art (1902) The American painter James McNeill Whistler’s series of nocturnal paintings , particularly the paintings of Cremorne Gardens, has gained historical significance as one of the key markers for early modernism, where the site—the spectacle at Cremorne—intersects with its avant-garde representation . As a popular pleasure garden in Victorian London, Cremorne can be seen as a site for modernity, the visual equivalent, of the café and cabaret life depicted by Whistler’s contemporaries, the French Impressionists. As the Impressionists sought out popular sites of urban leisure, Whistler found at Cremorne a suitable subject that could be immediately recognized as a controversial site for spectacle, one of the dominating features of modernity. The advent of Impressionism was arguably a visual response to the critic Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay ‘‘The Painter of Modern Life,’’ in which he encouraged the artist to look for subjects suitable for modernity— the ephemeral, the fleeting, the underworld—to ‘‘distill the eternal from the transitory’’ in depicting the subjects of the modern city.1 196 Anne Koval By the 1870s when Whistler painted and exhibited his nocturnes of Cremorne in Chelsea, Cremorne had long been established as a place of dubious reputation, associated with the mixing of classes, the swell or the dandy, and most significantly the prostitute. It is prostitution that came to be the downfall of Cremorne, leading to its closure in 1877, the same year that Whistler exhibited his most famous painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, a work that led to the notorious Whistler v. Ruskin trial of the following year. This chapter will examine the intersections of the site and spectacle of Cremorne Gardens as envisioned through the nocturnes of Whistler. By revisiting Whistler’s nocturnes of Cremorne, arguably his most abstract and modern work, this chapter will examine the history of these pleasure gardens , particularly Cremorne’s demise and the trial that hastened its closure in 1877, against Whistler’s own agency of producing work that can be regarded as part of the larger avant-garde movement of Modernism. One key feature of early Modernism and the rise of Impressionism was the controversy over the subjects depicted, many portraying the nightlife of Paris and prostitution. As Griselda Pollock has argued, prostitution became a marker for modernism: ‘‘Modernity is presented as far more than a sense of being ‘up to date’—modernity is a matter of representations and major myths—of a new Paris for recreation, leisure and pleasure, of nature to be enjoyed at weekends in suburbia, of the prostitute taking over and of fluidity of class in the popular spaces of entertainment. The key markers in this mythic territory are leisure, consumption, the spectacle and money.’’2 Although Pollock is speaking of Paris and the French Impressionists, the same can be said of Whistler and his decision to paint the pleasure gardens at Cremorne. Much of the city, as a site for modernity, involved the commodity of exchange, and the pleasure gardens functioned within the nexus of leisure activities brought on by these shifts in mid-century economic relations. Linked to this was the fact that Cremorne was a sought-out tourist destination , not only for visitors to the city but also for the urban dweller as a place for leisure and recreation. Dean MacCannell in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class classifies tourism as a form of modernity, formed fundamentally through leisure and culture, in major city centers like London and Paris.3 Cremorne Gardens as a site occupied a liminal space, being neither city nor country. The gardens were situated within the village of Chelsea outside the metropolis of London, located along the Thames River but easily accessible by cab, omnibus, or steamer. Chelsea had been a working-class artisan Figure 8.1. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875), oil on panel. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA. Gift of...