Early Morning

Whistler experimented with the expressive potential of lithography, and in the case of his rare lithotints, he applied washes of ink directly to the stone to create veils of pigment. The result is a nuanced representation of light and fog, as is seen in these evocations of life on London’s Thames River. At the time he produced these prints, Whistler was involved in a lawsuit with the famed English art critic John Ruskin, who had argued that the abstraction of one of Whistler’s painted Nocturnes defied the unwritten laws of aesthetics. Despite the notoriety—and bankrupting cost—of the legal case, Whistler persisted in his exploration of abstraction.