Excerpt:
At the time when Rossetti and his circle were foregathering chiefly at Rossetti’s house, quiet Chelsea scarcely knew how daily were associations added which will always cluster round her name. Whistler’s share in those associations is very large, and he has left in his paintings the memory of many a night, as he returned beside the river. Before Whistler painted it, night was more opaque than it is now. It had been [Pg 10]viewed only through the window of tradition. It was left for a man of the world coming out of an artificial London room to paint its stillness, and also to show us that we ourselves had made night more beautiful, with ghostly silver and gold; and to tell us that the dark bridges that sweep into it do not interrupt—that we cannot interrupt, the music of nature.
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