Skip to Content
Closed now, next open Thursday. Closed now, next open Thursday.

Trouville (Grey and Green, the Silver Sea)

A work made of oil on canvas.
CC0 Public Domain Designation

Image actions

  • A work made of oil on canvas.

Date:

1865

Artist:

James McNeill Whistler (American, 1834–1903)

About this artwork

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.

Status

On View, Gallery 246

Department

Arts of the Americas

Artist

James McNeill Whistler

Title

Trouville (Grey and Green, the Silver Sea)

Place

Trouville (Place depicted)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1865

Medium

Oil on canvas

Inscriptions

Signed, lower right: "Whistler"

Dimensions

51.5 × 77.2 cm (20 1/4 × 30 3/8 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Honoré and Potter Palmer

Reference Number

1922.448

IIIF Manifest  The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world.

Learn more.

https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/81572/manifest.json

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

Share

Sign up for our enewsletter to receive updates.

Learn more

Image actions

Share