James McNeill Whistler 'Nocturne: Blue and Gold' Old Battersea Bridge Exhibition Poster

Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (c. 1872–75), presented as a French-language exhibition poster for a fictional 1967 show at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Lausanne.

The painting shows the old wooden Battersea Bridge from the Thames at Chelsea, its pier rising dramatically against a blue dusk. Whistler exaggerated the bridge's height, compressing the composition into a vertical field of blue-grey tones broken by scattered fireworks and distant lights along the far bank. Chelsea Old Church is visible to the left, with Albert Bridge to the right. A lone figure stands on a barge at the foot of the pier.

Whistler painted his Nocturnes using a liquid medium he mixed from copal, turpentine, and linseed oil, applied in rapid sweeps across the canvas. The palette was built from Prussian blue, ultramarine, and lamp black, with small touches of chrome and cadmium yellow for the fireworks and lights. He worked largely from memory, studying a scene in the evening, then reciting its arrangement to a companion who corrected any errors before he committed it to paint the following morning.

The painting became central to the 1878 Whistler v. Ruskin libel trial after the critic accused the artist of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler won, but was awarded damages of one farthing. In 1905 the work became the first significant acquisition by the newly formed National Art Collections Fund, and it was presented to the Tate Gallery, where it remains.

The poster places the painting in a fictional summer 1967 exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Lausanne, an institution that also appears in our Paul Klee poster from the same period. The restrained typography and black surround reflect the Swiss-influenced graphic conventions of the late 1960s.