Wapping A young woman and her two male companions sit at a table in the foreground of this composition. Their simple, darkened shapes contrast the crowded activity behind them. Acting as a framing device, the figure’s dark shapes blend into the architectural moldings of the balcony on which they sit. The viewer then focuses on the colorful myriad of shipping activities. A steam vessel, with its smoking red chimney, floats on the river immediately above the young woman’s head. The empty stretch of water in between her head and the vessel is balanced on either side by large masted ships – some with raised sails. Diagonal lines of riggings and masts fill much of the empty area in the middle ground. Smaller rowboats dot the empty space, along with several barges pictured on the left. Sailboats, some with colorful sails, intermingle in limited visual space that moves towards the background. The muted violet hue on the horizon creates an impression of contours of many more masted ships. To the right, smoke billows from a tall brown chimneystack. Background The Angel Inn, the setting of Whistler’s image, was on the River Thames at Wapping. By the 1860s, the Thames was associated with industry, pollution, the working classes and poverty. Social problems, such as murder, suicide and prostitution proliferated there as well, and became a focal point for politicians, social reformers, writers and artists. In painting a description of the daily business, industry, and shipping activity along the Thames, Whistler has effectively created a painting of ‘modern’ life. A town, such as London, where a man may wander for hours together without reaching he beginning of the end...This colossal centralization, this heaping together of two and a half millions of human beings at one point...has raised London to the commercial capital of the world, created the giant docks and assembled the thousand vessels that continually cover the Thames. Just the other day a young American artist, M. Whistler, was showing at the Galerie Martinet a set of etchings, as subtle and as lively as improvisation and inspiration, representing the banks of the Thames; wonderful tangles of rigging, yardarms and rope; farragoes of fog, furnaces and corkscrews of smoke; the profound and intricate poetry of a vast capital. It seems, indeed, as if the heart of London has been cleft open for the mere purpose of showing how rotten and drearily mean it has become...And the muddy tide of the Thames, reflecting nothing, and hiding a million of unclean secrets within its breast – a sort of guilty conscience, as it were, unwholesome with the rivulets of sin that constantly flow into it – is just the dismal stream to glide by such a city.
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