Whistler's Venice, and: Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Whistler's Venice, and: Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice Anne Koval (bio) Whistler's Venice, by Alastair Grieve; pp. 216. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000, $50.00, £25.00. Palaces in the Night: Whistler in Venice, by Margaret MacDonald; pp. 160. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001, $35.00. These two books are welcome additions to nineteenth-century scholarship and Whistler studies. Despite the similarity of subject matter, the authors deal with the theme of J. M. Whistler's stay in Venice and his work there quite differently. Coming from diverse backgrounds, Alastair Grieve, as a nineteenth-century scholar, provides a wide base for approaching his subject, whereas Margaret MacDonald, a Whistler specialist, looks more closely at the work and context of Whistler's practice. Both of these beautifully illustrated books are labours of love; Grieve displays a close knowledge of Venice, and MacDonald, an expert's knowledge of Whistler. Much literature on Whistler has dealt with this important episode in the artist's life; surprisingly, no books on this subject alone have been produced until now. With the publication of Grieve's wonderfully contextual book on Whistler's Venice and MacDonald's more specialized approach to the subject, this aspect of the artist's life has now been very adequately covered. Grieve's approach is to rediscover Whistler's Venice by painstakingly tracing the sites the artist recorded in numerous etchings, pastels, and paintings, using both archival and his own photographs to retrieve the site. This very methodical and dedicated approach is linked to another Yale author Grieve mentions in his introduction, Pavel Machotka, whose Cézanne: Landscape into Art (1996) follows a similar format of photographically recording the various sites of Cézanne's paintings. What Machotka's approach allows—and what Grieve's doesn't account for—is an illuminating process of recovery and rediscovery from the perspective of the viewer. In the preface to Cézanne, Machotka describes the experience of looking at photographs of actual sites of composition: A photograph of the site of a well-known painting arouses our curiosity right away: it breaks open the sealed world of the landscape canvas, situates the artist in place and moment, and reminds us that an artist searches, gazes, at times disassembles, and recombines. It also encourages the hope that we will better understand the artist's purpose and vision. (ix) To this end, Grieve succeeds in arousing the reader's curiosity by visiting the various locales of Venice explored through Whistler's work. Grieve provides a broad contextual approach to the history of the city, particularly in the nineteenth century, when Whistler was living there, and contributes much valuable information for historians of this period. Divided into chapters on the sestieri of Venice, Grieve situates Whistler's work within the context of the local history and fleshes out the subjects of Whistler's etchings and pastels. Too often in Whistler literature, the picturesque subjects of Whistler's work are ignored, but Grieve addresses the working class of Venice in the latter part of the nineteenth century. An example can be found in beadworkers, a popular subject for many artists visiting Venice, most famously John Singer Sargent. Using archival photographs and the work of Whistler and his contemporaries, Grieve explores the social history of this local trade. Such research provides a rich context for viewing these works. [End Page 524] What Grieve does not address, however, is how this subject of the working classes fits into Whistler's oeuvre. Many of Whistler's etchings previous to Venice include the subject of the worker: boatmen along the Thames, blacksmiths in their smithies, or the local lower-class inhabitants of such areas. In Whistler's Venetian work, this interest is notably continued. Rarely does Whistler depict the middle classes, fashionable society, or the tourist. His scenes are of crumbling Venetian façades, back alleys, and courtyards, peopled by the lower classes. While the architecture of the city obviously held great aesthetic allure for Whistler, it was people of the lower classes who provided the picturesque detail. Grieve's introduction provides a valuable history of artists working in Venice...