RUSKIN VS WHISTLER

Scholar of the Victorians and with a particular taste for legal drama, historian and Oxford alumnus Paul Thomas Murphy (Merton, 2002, shown Right) has written a beautifully balanced account of the libel case that saw the preeminent art critic of Victorian England John Ruskin (Christ Church, 1836, (1819-1900)) go head to head with a brash newcomer who happened also to be an American – James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903, depicted below Left).

Falling Rocket, James Whistler, John Ruskin and the Battle for Modern Art, published on January 30, 2025, is not just about a libel case although the very fact that there was one, in November 1878, is a brilliant fulcrum upon which to lever a bigger narrative about generation, taste and sensibility – in fact modernism itself and from the perspective of 1950 and subsequently, modern art.

The title refers to a remarkably blackened, atmospheric rendering of a firework display that Whistler watched in London’s Cremorne Gardens, Chelsea. The preeminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin, disliked it intensely seeing only visual chaos, vilifying Whistler in a review in an obscure journal, where he criticised the artist for seeking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’

Whistler saw the review and instructed a lawyer to prepare a libel case.

Speaking to Paul by video at his base in Boulder, Colorado his booklined study brightly lit by morning light on snow, he reminds me that while he has maintained a long interest in the Victorian legal profession, the larger significance of this instance of legal contest was the cultural and social conflict that raged on its back.

The balance of the book is that Murphy insists that both men won and lost in both legal and cultural senses.

The judge awarded the narrow victory to Whistler, ‘narrow’ here denoting symbolic, because what Whistler really wanted was a big financial payout, damages, but he was awarded only a single farthing. Both men were hit with large legal fees that were shared on the instruction of the judge. 

Ruskin was so stung by the intellectual loss that it contributed to his resignation in 1879 from Oxford’s Slade Chair in Fine Art – remember here that Ruskin, formerly an undergraduate of Christ Church and one of the few people in history to achieve a double fourth, was its first holder in 1869 and it remains to this day the oldest professorship in art history.

Then began the aftermath of the court case. Murphy reminds me that Whistler’s apparent victory did not result in higher prices or more art sales, indeed the opposite.

He was a brash individual who seemed to welcome strife, not least with creditors. Soon he was insolvent and this bit of the book is truly remarkable – one imagines very few individuals withstanding so much financial buffeting, so much hounding by creditors, lawyers, bailiffs. But here was an American avant-garde who had lived in Paris in the 1850s, a proper scoundrel to boot. His babies were given away and one promptly died, Murphy tells us; on another occasion Whistler offered to duel a man who accused him of sleeping with his wife. Murphy reminds us that he had indeed slept with the man’s wife.

‘At the outset of the court trial he sought to downplay his American identity, committing perjury by insisting that he was from St Petersburg.’

Viewed like this one wonders to what degree the whole fight was about (1) money and (2) cultural difference including early ‘anti-Americanism.’ For instance it is notable how one of the barristers in the case grilled Whistler on how long it had taken him to ‘knock out’ the painting, two days being the answer – wholly inadequate to the fee of 200 guineas in any conventional assessment of Victorian labour.

What Murphy does so well is to balance the detail of the trial, which rivetted London high society and resulted in many cartoons, the most famous depicting the two litigants, ‘Naughty Critic, to use bad language!’ and ‘Silly Painter, to go to law about it!’ — with the much broader, deeper issues that were at stake and which can only be seen cleanly from the perspective of today.

Asked where his personal sympathies lie, Murphy is diplomatic but notes how Ruskin was a colossus with a completely evolved aesthetic premised on a deeply founded morality. In an epilogue he reminds us how Ruskin deeply influenced Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, William Morris, even Clement Attlee the post-war Labour Prime Minister. Most of this was not through Stones of Venice but through a less well known but blazing work, Unto this Last, a book that we should all probably be trying to recover amidst the bathetic impact of AI. There was a social ethic inside the aesthetic. He was a great writer rather than a great artist. Ruskin is famous in Oxford for upsetting the University authorities by getting students to do manual labour on a local road project, smashing up class distinctions to release their authentic, physical selves. Today's Ruskin School of Art is housed on the site of an old Music Hall on the Cowley Road. He would have liked that detail.

Whistler was not a great writer and whether he was a great artist remained to be seen inside his own generation. But he was pulling in a different direction, towards but not completely into abstraction. Despite his best efforts to wreck his reputation in a reticent English context through brash self-promotion, his talent was, and remains, obvious.

All of this is fascinating and potentially treacherous. Again the suspicion of anti-Americanism, the British high-priest of modern aesthetics Roger Fry accusing Whistler with his various ‘nocturnes’ (an irritating affectation by Whistler, aping Chopin, to please a patron, we learn) of divorcing art from what was human, even as Fry himself seemed to support a formalism that edged towards the sort of pure abstraction we associate with Kazimir Malevich (Black Square, 1915), Piet Mondrian or later in the twentieth century Mark Rothko.

Like most artists Whistler could only attain commercial success posthumously – the eternal irony.

But he did so in ways that fractured his support base, some insisting he was hyper-modern and others seeing his fresh, distinctively American portraiture as what made him special.

It was a false dichotomy, of course, because rather a lot rests of which Whistler we are discussing, which portion of a long career. But Whistler’s numerous nocturnes, inspired originally by travel to Chile plus knowledge of Japanese prints, command a special place in the pantheon of ‘modern art’ for a reason. The first MoMA Director Alfred Barr wrote of their ‘quiet horizontals, broad muted tones, evanescent surfaces and subtle edges.’

Murphy writes, ‘Whistler, in other words, tended always to abstraction, and although he never got there, he certainly pointed the way.’

Ruskin’s displeasure would seem to prove it but Ruskin may have had the last laugh, with ‘context’ returning to art in the very late twentieth century even while formalism continued unabated.

The book has fully sixteen pages of glorious colour plates that do justice both to the art and the artists, right down to the houses they lived in, whether it be the immense town house that bankrupted Whistler or the bought-unseen Lake Coniston escape capsule that Ruskin retreated to for his later years.

The prose style is wonderfully accessible and fulfils the author’s declared objective to write a mainstream book despite being an academic – something he partly attributes to his time studying as a mature student at Merton with Lawrence Goldman back in 2002-3, an experience that brought him closer than ever to Ruskin whose eponymous School of Fine Art thrives to this day.

On that basis we’ll hand the larger victory to Ruskin: but what SCR wouldn’t want a Whistler nocturne hanging on a bright wall?