Trouville (Grey and Green, the Silver Sea)

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 intently on formal concerns. In 1865 the artist traveled to Trouville, a French resort town, where he painted with Gustave Courbet and experimented with a series of increasingly simplified seascapes. The high horizon line and broad expanses of muted color in this spare composition reveal Whistler’s interest in Japanese woodblock prints. The sweeping, horizontal brushstrokes and restrained palette, limited to pale greens and soft grays, reinforce the painting’s innovative, flattened perspective.