A nocturne is a painting of the night in which the colors of the darkness, and the mood they create, matter more than anything the picture shows.
Most of the first ones show a river after dark: a few close tones of blue, gray or black, a scatter of small lights, and buildings, boats and people melting into the shadows.
The term is tied above all to James McNeill Whistler, an American painter who lived in London and gave it to his views of the river Thames at night in the 1870s. Since then it has also served, more loosely, for any painting of a night scene.
Music had the word first. There, a nocturne is a piece written for the night, and in the late eighteenth century an Italian notturno was a set of light pieces for a few musicians, meant for the evening and often played outdoors.
Such music paints no scene and tells no story. It creates a mood, and that was exactly what Whistler wanted from his views of the river. The word itself was suggested to him by his leading patron.
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The river was right outside his windows. He lived in Chelsea, a district on the bank of the Thames in London, and his mother wrote in 1875 that "his Moonlight pictures are from his own look out on the Thames."
Nocturne: Blue and Silver, Chelsea, signed and dated 1871, is one of the earliest. On the left a barge lies low in the water, on the right one figure stands on the shore, and the far bank is reduced to a band of blue-black pricked with a few lights.
When the Chelsea picture was first exhibited in London, in 1871, it was not yet a nocturne. It hung under another title, Harmony in Blue-Green, Moonlight, and Whistler called these views moonlights.
The patron who suggested the new word was Frederick Leyland, a wealthy shipowner from Liverpool. In a letter of November 1872 the painter thanked him: "I can't thank you too much for the name 'Nocturne' as a title for my moonlights!"
Paintings named like music
A picture without a story went against the taste of his time…
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Which night paintings are not nocturnes.
Who painted nocturnes after Whistler.