Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Old Battersea Bridge

For his contemporaries as for recent scholars, the primary fact about Whistler is his singularity. It may be said that he and his critics, in a strange collusion born of antipathy and adulation in equal measure, have made of Whistler himself an object of aesthetic judgement...

~In 1890 a short comic piece appeared in Puck’s Library under the title “A Chapter in Art,” in which the paintings stored away in a house’s attic begin to talk. The main speaker in this exchange, a view of Mount Popocatépetl erupting, traces its career from fame to oblivion:

Nineteenth-century practice was to varnish paintings at the very last minute, when the work was already hanging in the exhibition: oil paintings had to be left the maximum time possible to dry before the varnish was applied. The vernissage, varnishing day – the day before the exhibition opened to the public – was an institution during...