The Zattere: Harmony in Blue and Brown

Considered one of James McNeill Whistler’s finest pastel drawings, The Zattere: Harmony in Blue and Brown is a view of the Fondamenta della Zattere, a busy waterfront on the south side of Venice, Italy. Whistler positioned himself high up to look down on the passersby gathering in the foreground, near the Café Oriental just beyond the picture’s right edge; shipping and quays fill the distance, broken by the sketchy outline of an upright tree. Pinholes along the edges of the paper indicate that Whistler worked on the pastel for several sessions, but the economical rendering of the scene in thin, sketchy black outlines, spare touches of bright color, and open areas of untouched surface—the brown of the title—all suggest the casual impression of a passing moment, in an image as informal as its workaday subject. The tipped-up perspective, resulting high horizon, and vertical format testify to Whistler’s passion for Japanese woodblock prints, from which he also absorbed an aesthetic of linear detail balanced asymmetrically against flat, open areas.

Scandal-ridden and nearly bankrupt, Whistler left London in 1879 for Venice for what was to have been a three-month stay to produce a series of twelve etchings commissioned by the London-based Fine Art Society. The artist was so entranced by Venice that he remained there for more than a year, producing more than fifty etchings and about one hundred pastels, among them The Zattere: Harmony in Blue and Brown. In contrast to such familiar precedents as the consciously romantic Venetian paintings of English artist James M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Whistler sought out everyday scenes of the modern city; yet his selective approach, emphasizing formal, decorative qualities over literal representation and eschewing conventions of detail and finish, made the most of the evanescent atmosphere for which Venice was famous.

In Venice, Whistler may have turned to pastel because the unusually cold winter weather of that year made it difficult to hold the metal plates used to create etchings, but he undoubtedly had aesthetic reasons as well. Long considered suitable only for amateur and female artists, pastel enjoyed a renaissance in the late nineteenth century as artists discovered its distinctive softness of outline and matte, saturated color. For Whistler, pastel represented a considerable departure from his accustomed medium of etching, with its precise, delicate lines and subtle tones of gray and black. Pastel is a soft, crumbly, delicate medium almost as ephemeral as Venice’s shimmering effects of light and water; it lends itself to a variety of applications, as demonstrated in this work, in which Whistler alternately drew in thin outlines, rubbed the color after application, and lightly scraped with the side of the pastel stick. Using coarse-grained gray and brown papers for his pastel drawings, the artist left large areas of the surface untouched by pastel to function as elements in his composition. The work’s seemingly unfinished state, spontaneous execution, and apparently random arrangement of notes of color demonstrate Whistler’s iconoclastic ideal of art as the harmonious organization of the purely visual elements of color, line, shape, and texture, independent of imposed subject matter.

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