Trouville (Grey and Green, the Silver Sea)

1865

In the early 1860s, James McNeill Whistler began to develop an art-for-art’s-sake aesthetic, eschewing narrative or naturalistic details to focus more on formal concerns. In 1865 he traveled to the French town of Trouville, where he painted with Gustave Courbet and experimented with a series of simplified seascapes. The high horizon line and broad expanses of muted color in this spare composition reveal his interest in Japanese woodblock prints.

Public domain · CC0
Free to download and reuse. Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.

Artist

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903)

Date

1865

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

51.5 × 77.2 cm (20 1/4 × 30 3/8 in.)

Origin

Trouville

Collection

Art Institute of Chicago

Credit

Gift of Honoré and Potter Palmer