Harmony in Blue and Silver: Trouville

This picture, painted in the autumn of 1865 when Whistler worked alongside the artist Gustave Courbet at Trouville, marks an important moment in the development of Whistler’s art. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Courbet’s defiantly unconventional paintings and persona had provided a strong model for Whistler. Harmony in Blue and Silver is at once a tribute to Courbet’s influence and an assertion of the younger artist’s move toward more exclusively aesthetic concerns and an independent painting style. Titled by Whistler in 1866 as Courbet – on sea shore, this painting echoes the composition of Courbet’s The Beach at Palavas (1854). Yet, while it refers to that picture and represents the figure of Courbet within its composition, Harmony in Blue and Silver is a turning point in the emergence of what would come to be Whistler’s mature painting mode.