Grey and Silver: Old Battersea Reach  1863

James McNeill Whistler painted marine subjects throughout his career. For several years beginning in 1855, the expatriate American artist divided his time between London and Paris; in the latter, he was exposed to the bold realism and thickly impastoed surfaces of the paintings of Gustave Courbet. The older artist’s influence shaped Whistler’s depiction of the Thames River...