STRATFORD-UPON-AVON.- This autumn sees Compton Verney casting a new light on the work of the great late-Victorian master, James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), with an exhibition exploring his relationship with nature.

Curated in partnership with The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, Whistler and Nature explores the artist’s revolutionary attitude towards the natural world, as expressed in works ranging from his celebrated London Nocturnes to his Dutch and French coastal and pastoral scenes.

This fascinating exhibition of around 90 oil paintings, works on paper and objects - such as the Whistler’s sketchbook - shows how his singular vison was underpinned by his enduring kinship with the makers of railroads, bridges and ships - the cornerstones of Victorian wealth and trade.

“Iconic portraits such as ‘Whistler’s Mother’ are world renowned, but less well known is the influence of nature on Whistler’s work”, says Compton Verney’s Chief Executive, Professor Steven Parissien. “This exhibition was borne out of Dr Patricia de Montfort’s (Lecturer in History of Art/Curator in Whistler Studies at the University of Glasgow) innovative research into Whistler’s work from a particularly American standpoint and in the context of the US military. “

Whistler came from a family of soldiers and engineers, with his father, Major George Washington Whistler, originally a US army engineer. Like his father, Whistler’s brother was also involved in building America’s railroads, while the artist himself was a military mapmaker, first as an officer cadet at West Point Academy in 1851-4 and subsequently in the Drawing Department at the US Coast and Geodetic Survey.

Whistler’s close observation of nature and its moods underpinned his powerful and haunting visions of 19th-century life. Finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler entitled many of his paintings ‘nocturnes’, emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony. His images explore the contrasts between the natural and man-made worlds: rivers and wharves, gardens and courtyards, the ideal and the naturalistic, which is being explored in the exhibition through works such as The Bathing Posts, Brittany (c.1893) Nocturne: Chelsea (c.1881), Nocturne: Chelsea Embankment (1883/4) and Copy of 'Nocturne: Black and Gold - The Fire Wheel' (1893), all from The Hunterian.

Whistlers’ singular vision was always defined by his enduring kinship with the makers of railroads, bridges and ships, the cornerstones of Victorian wealth and trade. Whistler inherited a tradition of British landscape painting forged at a time when land was the predominant source of wealth a concept which also permeated the work of landscape designers, such as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown - the creator of Compton Verney’s magnificent landscape setting. Just as the English country house came to be viewed as the wealth-producing hub of the landscape that sustains it, so Whistler’s smoky images of warehouses, bridges, harbours and ships were themselves components of a new kind of productive, wealth-generating landscape.

By the 1880s and 90s, Whistler’s images of parks, gardens, promenades and seaside resorts offer glimpses of the products of this wealth, in the form of suburban life and leisure, expressed in works such as Sketch for 'The Balcony' (1867/70), Cliffs and Breakers (1884), A Distant Dome (1901/04) and Sketch for ‘Annabel Lee’ (1869/70), all three from The Hunterian.

With rapid brushstrokes, Whistler captured the fleeting movement of figures – sometimes battling against the weather, at other times poised serenely in elegant robes. The figures in Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses (c.1864, The Hunterian) (left), gaze out over the Thames, dwarfed by the vast, foggy expanse of the river that has been built up via layers of thin, liquefied paint, “like breath on the surface of a pane of glass,” as the artist himself put it. This is a view of nature constrained by man-made structures – the shadowy outline of the warehouses and chimneys on the far shore, the mast and rigging of a Thames barge in the mid horizon.

Whistler and Nature showcases new research on Whistler’s technique, notably in oil, watercolour and etching, and his writings on art undertaken by academics at the University of Glasgow. It also reviews Whistler’s work in the studio – his classicised figure studies in oil, pastel and chalk in the context of 19th-century revivalism, an area that has so far received only limited research attention. Taken together, the exhibition themes shed new light on the Western classical tradition that underpins Whistler’s efforts to reinvent nature and the modern, and his reputation as the most innovative and modernizing American artist of his time.

Beginning at Compton Verney in Warwickshire, Whistler and Nature will then tour to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and Newcastle upon Tyne’s Laing Art Gallery, before arriving in Glasgow in the spring of 2020.