Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, James A.M Whistler, 1875
Whistler’s impressionist painting of fireworks approaches the abstraction suggested in his title. He emphatically rejected the precise depiction of objects in earlier Victorian painting. When the critic John Ruskin saw the painting in Grosvenor Gallery, he wrote in Fors Clavigear that he “never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and won; but he was awarded damage of only one farthing, and the trial left him financially ruined.
