PLEIN AIR HERITAGE
Having spent most of his life in Paris and London, American-born James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) drew inspiration from a host of artistic influences, including the Dutch masters, Spanish Baroque, French contemporary Realists, Japanese decorative art, and the Pre-Raphaelites, to develop his unique painting style. Rejecting the popular notion that art should contain moral or historical meaning, he focused instead on creating harmony and effecting mood through the use of color, tone, brush-stroke, texture, and composition. Painted en plein air, this intimately scaled seascape marked a distinct shift from the artist’s studio-produced nocturnes of the previous decade. Here he used the sparest of compositional elements to evoke the serene coastal atmosphere on the spot. Broad horizontal bands of blues and gray suggest sky, ocean, and sand, with dabs of thin paint giving…