Whistler and Battersea: The Aesthetics of Erasure and Redevelopment

Abstract

This article looks at the significance of South London for Whistler, particularly the line of Battersea factories that he viewed and depicted repeatedly from his home on Cheyne Walk, where he lived from the 1860s. It uses Variations in Flesh Colour and Green, The Balcony (1864–1873) as a way of considering the context and precursors of these factories in Battersea, interrogating Whistler’s use of Japonisme, and his emerging aesthetic that went on to manifest in the nocturnes and become fully articulated in his “Ten O’clock Lecture”. A contrast is drawn between Whistler’s depiction of factories in Variations in Flesh Colour and Green and the nocturnes, and use of these buildings as motifs in earlier British social realist art and writing of the 1840s and 1850s. Parallels are found between the transformation of industrial Battersea into a twilit fairyland of the imagination, as advocated in Whistler’s lecture, and the subsequent developer-led transformation of Battersea’s riverside, which started in the late twentieth century, turning it into a new zone of exclusive riverside apartment blocks where, quite literally, “the tall chimneys become campanile—and the warehouses are palaces in the night”.

Keywords

• battersea
• river thames
• japonisme
• james abbott mcneill whistler