The Thames In Ice

The Thames In Ice

Whistler, James McNeill

Oil on Canvas

30 x 22 inches

1861

James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born on July 11, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts.  He was educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, and then attended the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Establishing himself as a painter in Paris and London, Whistler developed his distinctive style, utilizing muted colors and simple forms.  Whistler died in 1903.

http://www.biography.com/people/james-abbott-mcneill-whistler-9529133

The boats here are rendered with an almost dry brush over a thinly painted background.  The masts and sails are accurately drawn, not merely suggested, as they would be in later river paintings.

Painted after Whistler finally settled in London, this painting and other works in ‘the Thames set’ show the artists fascination with life along the river.  The French realist influence is much in evidence, but the treatment of the distant factories, the sky and the water foreshadows the evocative mood of the later Nocturnes.

The Great Artists, Book 14
Whistler
Funk & Wagnalls
1978

All paintings were selected solely on the basis that they fit within the theme of boats or ships, and that I felt emotionally moved by them