Original subtitles

Wisseler is one of the pioneers of modern art and the personification of its contradictory

spirit and energy. He was confident bordering on arrogant, elegant, bordering on vain,

intelligent, articulate, controversial and original. He was the first great international

American artist, hugely well-traveled, a painter and printmaker who reinvigorated the

arts in England, who bridged the gap between impressionist Paris and symbolist London,

and who radically proclaimed that art rather than telling stories or documenting aspects of the

world around us should be experienced for its own sake, rather in the way that music is.

James Abbott-Magnil Wisseler was born on the 11th of July 1834 in low Massachusetts. His father

was a West Point graduate who became a railway engineer. For the first six years of his life,

Wisseler and his family traipsed up and down the railroads as his father's work took him,

from Massachusetts to Connecticut and then back to Massachusetts again, and then in 1842,

when Wisseler was just eight, his father got an extraordinary commission to go and help

establish the first railroad in Russia between Moscow and the St. Petersburg.

In St. Petersburg, an art teacher singled Wisseler out, for, quote, his uncommon genius,

but a Colorado break forced the family to move to England. Here he was taken under the

wing of the painter William Boxel, who in palaces like Hampton Court showed in the work of the

great past masters, and Wisseler decided it was in their footsteps he wished to tread.

But just as he was beginning to settle in London, Wisseler's father died, and once again,

the family had to upstix and return to the USA in 1849.

Two years later, Wisseler like his father entered the U.S. military academy at West Point,

it was a popular student but undisciplined, which eventually saw him expelled by the Academy

Superintendent, one Robert E. Lee. The one course in Wichy Hadick'sel, though, was drawing and etching.

And in order to develop these skills, Wisseler decided to leave the United States in 1855,

never to return, and to head to the art capital of the Western world, Paris.

Wisseler seems to have made the most of his time in Paris. For a start, he enters the studio

of a painter called Charles Gleir, where he learns even more of the painter's trade.

He then spends time in the Louvre copying old masters, and perhaps most importantly of all,

he starts to hang out with contemporary artists in the city. He was a kind of behaving in scene.

The artist has a fashionable outsider, slightly impoverished, hanging out in cafes, exchanging ideas,

and there's no doubt that Wisseler started to do that. But there was another scene, that of the

Dandy, that Wisseler embraced much more wholeheartedly. He'd seen himself as a Dandy from his time

at West Point. But in Paris, the critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, had talked about the Dandy,

as being part of a cult of the self, artists in some ways striking a pose and also finding

themselves an original kind of personality. And I think all of that feeds into this early self-portrait

by Wisseler, the painter peering out of the darkness into the light, and trying to strike his own

pose, develop his own personality, and by extension his own artistic vision. And straight after this

work, he embarks on the first major oil painting of his career.

At the piano is a family portrait that shows Wisseler's sister Deborah, together with her daughter,

playing music, but in a way that seems rather hollow and joyless. The piano had originally

been in St Petersburg with the family, and Deborah would play duets with her father on the flute.

After his death, the piano was shipped to Deborah's house in London, where she lived with

her husband. Wisseler shows his sister dressed in black, with her daughter in contrasting white,

the colours of mourning for Victorian adults and children respectively. The addition of brown

her lament for a lost father, where all extraneous detail is stripped back, and Wisseler concentrates

on a simple but effective format of horizontal lines, almost like the staves on a sheet of music,

a reference which would grow stronger and more pronounced over the coming years.

Wisseler finished at the piano in the early spring of 1859 and submitted it to the Paris Salon,

the place for artists to gain recognition and to sell their work, but where the establishment

ruled the roost and were likely to look with suspicion, had anything which seemed experimental,

or unacademic, and Wisseler's painting was duely rejected.

Later in 1859, and probably partly because of his rejection at the Salon in Paris,

Wisseler moved here to London, and ended up taking an apartment here in whopping,

then part of the busiest docks in Europe. In fact, it brought Wisseler closest to the part of

that was to inspire much of his best art for the rest of his career, the River Thames,

starting out here in the east, and eventually moving west to Chelsea.

London itself was experiencing difficulties. In fact, within a year of Wisseler being there,

the Thames froze solid for 14 weeks, and it was that that inspired this picture,

Thames on Ice by Wisseler and the Winter of 1860. The scene is elevated,

Wisseler looks down on the River, and you see various men trying to go about their daily work,

trying to break through the ice, and unload this coal ship.

Formally the way the painting's arranged is interesting. It's broken in half with the ship

and it's tall mast on this side, which give it a nice vertical thrust, which is echoed here

by the man in the foreground that leads us to spectator into the picture. But also, he layers

it horizontally in bands of kind of murky mud of snow or ice, then on the horizon,

the factories of London. And the painting is painted in a fairly radical way.

He applies it onto his brush, loaded, and unmixed, and drags the paint across the surface

of the canvas to reveal something of the weave underneath, and you get this amazing texture

that is both mud and ice of the solid river.

Wisseler's absorption of the English art scene, but also his credentials as an Anglo-French painter,

a brilliantly exemplified in this work. It's called symphony and white number one,

the white girl, but that's not what Wisseler called it when he first showed it. It was just

called the white girl, and it shows his mistress and his model, and muse, I suppose, at this stage

in his career, Joanne Hiffin and in a studio in Paris, he's gone back to Paris in the summer of 1861,

and he puts a white sheet over the window, stands are in front of it, and paints her in a white dress,

a modest white dress, maybe not my arstanders, but remember, this is the age of krinnellins,

and she's holding a white lily, and she's standing on a bare skin. Now what does it mean?

Some people thought this was a painting that wrestled with the idea of a loss of virtual,

perhaps a loss of virginity, not so says Wisseler. Wisseler maintains that he simply wants to

try and produce a rather daring image of a woman in white against a different tone of white,

and he's trying to produce a neutral image, and he's being deliberately provocative and mysterious,

and it's about the process of painting and of representation, and simply this is a woman in an artist

studio being painted. Now for those reasons, and for one other reason, the work was rejected

or when it was presented to be shown by Wisseler at the Royal Academy in London. The other

reason being that to contemporaries, the loose treatment of paint here meant that they considered the

work to be unfinished. Now Wisseler, in a way, loves this, because he then shows it in London

a few months later, in a commercial gallery in Burner Street, with a label next to it saying rejected by

the Academy. A year later, he takes it to Paris to the illustrious salon there, it gets rejected again,

and in fact, it then shows, in what's called the salon de Refuser, where all the artworks

that have been rejected by the salon were gathered together, including perhaps the most celebrated

controversial work of the 19th century, Manay's Dejanace Aleb, and oddly enough, this work

causes almost a similar kind of stir as the Manay, and Wisseler becomes associated with what's

the avant-garde, or vanguard advanced artists, and Wisseler suddenly has pushed himself to the

forefront of the art scene in Paris and in London. Apart from the influence of photography,

which was slowly developed through the middle of the 19th century, the single most important

impact on Western art was Japanese painting, and this came about, because in 1854, Japan and America

signed a treaty, and it meant that Japan started to export, in particular art and art, in fact.

And so that struck a chord and became a fashion amongst artists and men and women of society

throughout Western Europe, and that's reflected, and perhaps inspires this painting by Wisseler,

called the balcony, painted in the late 1860s when Wisseler was wrestling with his own style,

and in a way, this is a transitional painting. In the foreground,

you can see four women having a Japanese party or tea party on a balcony. And stylistically,

the Japanese interest in flattening form, also cropping, this is an asymmetrical painting,

which is cropped, seems to be savagely cropped on the right-hand side, and then you get these

azalea flowers, seeming to float across the surface of the canvas, and butterflies up here in the

top left-on corner, and here in the bottom left-on corner, Wisseler instead of signing his paintings,

starting to use the butterfly as his own emblem, his own mark. But, this is a painting of contrast,

and it's a hybrid painting, because in fact, look at the faces of the women, they're not Japanese,

they're Western women, dressing up, the actricly playing the part if you like. And then in the

background, you see factories and a river, and in fact, is the river Thames, and this is Wisseler's own

balcony in Chelsea, in the West End of London, and he fuses these two realities together,

and there's a contrast of the almost monochrome of the river and the factories with the bright

colour of the Japanese tea party in the foreground, and this contrast between the prezekic and the

exotic, and between painting as an illusion and painting as a decorative arrangement for

mania static reasons of colour and form becomes the main tension in Wisseler's art for the

rest of his career. The 37-year-old Wisseler shared his Chelsea home, now number 96,

Cheney Walk, with his mother, who wrote to friends of how a son enjoyed his early morning

rose on the river before joining up a breakfast. Then he'd go to his studio and lock himself

away to work, but the boundaries became blurred for a time at the end of the summer of 1871,

when he decided to get his mother to sit for him. Actually, she stood first of all, but after three

days, Wisseler realized it was too tiring for a 67-year-old woman, and so she sat, gazing off into

space, had right angles to a son, and presenting a noble, resigned profile for his contemplation.

The work has become one of the most famous portraits ever made, odd in a way for such a

mute picture dominated by black and gray, but that's part of its appeal. It's solemnity,

which opens it up to parody and humour. It's also a touchingly intimate portrayal of a man's

mother, with whom he had a difficult relationship, but whom he clearly loved and respected.

Anna Matilda McNeil Wisseler was a devout a piscopalian Protestant, who went to church each in every

Sunday. Her resigned, but defined expression reflects a life of material comfort, but maternal grief.

She lost two children and a husband, and Wisseler manages to convey the patience,

fortitude, and quiet dignity of a woman who has never quite got over her loss, and never will.

Wisseler painted a portrait on the back of an old canvas, a gesture of economy that his mother

well have approved of, and which gave the painting a smooth, saturated matte surface,

which made her head all the more subtly pronounced, as if it were almost alive and about to turn

towards us. Although the initial settings with his mother were finished after a couple of months,

the painting took Wisseler years to complete, a labor of filial love, which a struck a universal

cord. Soon after completing the portrait of his mother, Wisseler began the most original

and the most radical series of his entire life called the Nocturns of which this subtitled

blue and gold old-battersy bridge is the most celebrated and perhaps the most extreme.

When you look at it, it is clear that you are looking at a cropped version of battersy bridge,

but rather being a literal description, what Wisseler is doing, is giving us something that is

evocative that is atmospheric, hence the title Nocturn, obviously this is painted at night,

but the Nocturns actually stem from show-pounds music and he's trying to create a musical analogy.

What Wisseler is doing is moving towards the idea of abstraction, and moving art away from

literal depiction because photography is already starting to do that, and he's putting forward

an idea that's new in British art that's developed in France called art for art sake, and Wisseler

says that art should be liberated from all clap trap and that it should only appeal to the artistic

sense of eye or ear without, as he puts it, introducing emotions that are foreign to it.

The scale and ambition of Wisseler's work, increased dramatically, with a project that he began in

1876 known as the Peacock Grum, which is one of the greater achievements of decorative arts

in the 19th century. It was for this room, the dining room of a shipping magnet called Frederick

Leyland, who had a house in London, and Leyland had an interior architect, a man called Jackal,

who was designing a room to show off his amazing porcelain collection, and Wisseler was only

invited in to advise about the colours to paint the doors and the shutters. There was a painting

by Wisseler that Leyland aboard here, which was at the centre of this wall, called the Princess

in the Land of Porcelain, and Wisseler argued that this painting actually looked much better in a room

that wasn't decorated by red leather paneling, which is how the room was originally designed.

So he had an agreement with Leyland that he just put some yellow on the walls in order to bring

the thing to life. Leyland went away having agreed this, and then Wisseler took over, and this

is the result. Imagine, you've agreed one thing, when you come back, this is how the room looks,

and Wisseler takes over, paints all the leather walls blue. He then adds gold to paint these extraordinary

peacocks full of plumage on all the shutters and the walls, and eventually creates a total

art environment. He titles this as a work harmony in blue and gold the peacock room. Now, when Leyland

returns, actually, he's not over the moon, because Wisseler gives him a bill for 2000 Guinness,

and they have an argument in an end, they settle at a thousand pounds. And Wisseler gets his revenge

by painting on the final wall, this mural of two fighting peacocks, one covered in money

and with money on the ground, and the other with a little plume, which is reminiscent of Wisseler's

own whitening curls, and he calls this art and money the story of the room. And the upshot is positive.

Leyland keeps it as a dinosaur and uses it, and later it's acquired by an American railroad magnet,

called Charles Frier, and he then ends up here in the Frier Gallery of Art in Washington.

And for Wisseler, it's one of his crowning achievements, a giant lack of box that he,

when he goes to Venice and sees the mosaic sits and marks, thinks just shades them, customary

whistle or arrogance. And that dispute and the achievements of the peacock room, put Wisseler

onto a different level of reputation, but also of notoriety. But just around the corner,

is a dispute, of even greater magnitude. In fact, it's the most famous trial in art history.

The Ferrari began with an explosive painting, this ambitious attempt by Wisseler to show a firework

bursting into life against a night sky, and part of the ongoing nocturned series.

The works called nocturn, black and gold, the falling rocket. The painting was reviewed by the

most eminent art critic of the day, John Ruskin, himself a painter, but a better writer, historian,

and polemesis, who described Wisseler's work on sale for 200 Guinness as a pot of paint flung in the

public's face. Wisseler was outraged and sued for libel, and the case was heard over two days,

in a courtroom packed with press and public. Aside from the drama and notoriety of the event,

various issues were at stake, not least, Wisseler's belief that art could and should exist for its

own sake. His description of the nocturn, not as a view of the river, or as part of London,

but quote an arrangement of line and form and colour, anticipated the whole development of abstract

painting in the 20th century. But the crux of the case was Ruskin's obsession with the finished

quality of works of art, and the idea of cost-equaling labour.

Under questioning from the attorney general, no less, Wisseler was asked,

did you take much time to paint the nocturn in black and gold? How soon did you knock it off?

To which he replied, so, don't agree, how I knocked one off possibly in a couple of days,

one day to do the work, another to finish it. The labour of two days is that for which you

asked 200 Guinness asked the attorney general. No, replied Wisseler. I asked it for the knowledge

I've gained in the work of a lifetime, for which he was randomly applauded. In the end,

Wisseler won the case, but was humiliated by damages of a farving.

Wisseler felt vindicated, but he was bankrupt, thanks in part to the trial, so he decided to

leave London and head to Venice. Just as he'd done with his pictures of the river Thames,

so Wisseler was picking up the mantle of GMW Turner in going to Venice, but he ventured much

further afield, came off the Grand Canal, and into the watery labyrinth of back streets and canals.

I've learnt to know Wisseler wrote, a Venice in Venice that others have never perceived.

Sure or not, on his return to London in 1881, the Venetian paintings were a considerable

commercial success. Wisseler's travels became an important footnote in the history of English

painting when in December 1883, he came here to the Cornish fishing town of St. Dives.

In a way, he was following in Turner's footsteps and became the second in an illustrious line

of English artists who settled in the place and made it one of the most significant artists

colonies in Europe, culminating a hundred years later in the building of the Tates and Dives.

At the age of 51, Wisseler showed no signs of slowing down. A colleague, men pairs recalled,

Wisseler rose at Cockrow and seemed always full of the most untiring energy.

Screaming reproaches instructions, taunts, and commands at the Somnil and followers.

But there were also signs that the painter was mellowing, at least emotionally,

when he became involved with the wife of an architect who just died.

Beatrice Godwin, who sat for this painting in 1886, was a self-apainter, and the experience

seemed to bring the two together. Two years later, Wisseler and Beatrice married.

In 1894, Charles Frier, the American railroad magnet, who eventually acquired the peacock

asked Wisseler to paint him a spring picture. And Wisseler's response, ironically, in homage to

the peacock room, because the first part of the title was Harmony in Blue and Gold, was this work.

Of a new young girl, a little blue girl, as it's subtitled, and if you look at this work now,

it doesn't really have that spring-like field, although a young adolescent girl on the verge of

an age-old symbol for the idea of spring. But something happens in between Wisseler starting

this work, and his eventual completion of it. When he began the picture, Wisseler was in one of

the happier periods of his life. His marriage to Beatrice was strong. But within a year or so,

she was diagnosed as having cancer. And Wisseler paints and draws and makes lithographs of a

series of very moving images, the best of which is called by the balcony, and shows his wife,

lying in bed at the room in the Savoy where they were staying, with an image of London

that Wisseler painted so frequently throughout his life, seeming to flicker off and almost disappear

into the distance. And on the 10th of May, 1896, Beatrice dies, and Wisseler is consumed overwhelmed

by grief, and eventually writes a letter to Fria apologising, they're not being in touch with

him, explaining what has happened, and saying that he feels unable to convey his grief

through anything other than his canvases. And it's in that context, I think, that we should

look at this work, because the figure of the girl seems to be almost on the verge of being

overwhelmed by this blue-y grey cape. And in a way, it's an eloquid image of the idea of grief,

that's one way in which you can see it. And it's only after Wisseler's death, that Fria finally

acquires the work that he requested as an image of springtime. But I think whose vision now

is much more autumnal. Wisseler's last years was slightly listless, and it's certainly

fair to say he never recovered from Beatrice's death. He sold his Parisian house in studio,

and continued to travel as he'd always done, venturing as far afield as Rome, Gibraltar,

and North Africa. There were numerous honours bestowed on him, and various celebrated exhibitions too.

But he painted little of consequence, and finally, on the 17th of July 1903, Wisseler died in London,

a few days after his 69th birthday. In his will, Wisseler stipulated that none of the work

that he owned should ever find a place in an English art gallery, and yet in spite of his

eventual contempt for the English, Maynard is a result of the trial. He was perhaps the man most

responsible for the development of modern art in England, particularly abstract painting.

There are those who take Wisseler's art and personality a little too much at face value,

stressing his obsession with good taste and aesthetic appearance, and there's no doubt that

the fame and notoriety he achieved in his lifetime continues to obscure the fact that along with

his delicate and refined technique, Wisseler was an experimental artist with a constantly questioning

vision as to what painting was, and what it might become.