“Flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”:
Whistler as a source of recognition for Frank Budgen (and of inspiration for Joyce?)

by Onno Kosters

In preparation for a paper on digression in Sterne and Joyce I went looking for clues as to what I could add to this already well-covered field.[1] Foraying, first of all, into familiar sources, I came across the following words in which Frank Budgen describes the end of ‘Nausicaa’: "Sound aids the illusion of space, the hiss and splutter of fireworks […] Smell, too: for Gerty MacDowell’s farewell to Bloom is waved with scented wadding across the space that divides them. And movement […] intensifies the pictorial lyricism. It is a Whistler theme painted with the greater elegance and liveliness of a Fragonard."[2]
 
Thus, looking for clues, I found a fresh (if marginal) problem: which theme, or prefarably, which painting(s) would Budgen be referring to here?

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), the impressive American impressionist, who turns up as the painter Elstir in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, “the only [artist] of whom America can be justly proud," according to Camille Pisarro, was well-known for a series of ‘Nocturnes’ depicting the sea-side, hence, the “theme” referred to by Budgen: Nocturne: Blue and Silver – Chelsea (1871), Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lights (1872), Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1872), Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1875).

The painting Budgen had in mind is, presumably, the last of this series. And perhaps Joyce had had it “in his” (U 4.6) mind, too, when he painted his verbal portrait of Gerty’s ecstatic vision on Sandymount Strand. Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket gives us a beach at night, as seen from behind, i.e., with a view of the sea, on which the lonely figure of a girl is witnessing an almost apocalyptic, but certainly orgasmic fireworks display over the contours of a town.[3]

Apart from the colours black and gold, the colour green is especially prominent in the painting; gold and green are prominent, too, in Gerty’s appreciation of the fireworks display:

And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind blank and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely, O, soft, sweet, soft! (U  13.736-40)


source: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/W/whistler/falling_rocket.jpg.html

It is tempting to add here that the downfall of Whistler is connected with this painting; it did him no good at all: it made John Ruskin, “now in his sixties and beginning to show signs of the madness and melancholy that disfigured his last years,”[4] sick as a Hottentot: “The ill-educated conceit of the artist […] approached the aspect of wilful imposture […] I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.” Whistler sued for libel. It is rarely wise to sue a critic. He won the case, but it was a Pyrrhic victory: the judge awarded him one farthing in damages, and the costs of the trial bankrupted him. Whistler lost his house, his collection of blue-and-white porcelain - everything. The falling rocket took him down with it; that disputed firework might have been Whistler's own career.[5]

“Up like a rocket, down like a stick,” (U 13.895), as Bloom would have observed, had he known of Whistler’s tragic fate.

 

[1] “But indeed Sir, I wander from the point: Digression in Joyce and Sterne”, delivered at the20th International James Joyce Symposium in Dublin (2004). The main point of the paper was that through Joyce and Sterne’s digressions the point is made that not to make the point is the only point to make.
[2] Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses and Other Writings (OUP, 1991), p. 219. The words quoted are followed by the clue I was looking for: “It is a Sterne tale of Swift told by Sterne. Joyce always felt that these two writers ought to change names” (ibid.). I am not sure which Fragonard Budgen may have had in mind; perhaps The Bathers (1765), a certainly ‘lively’ scene of five naked angels joyfully taking a bath.
[3] In the background of Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge fireworks are also to be observed, but nothing like the fiery display that Whistler has tortured his canvas with in in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket.
[4]  Robert Hughes, American Visions, quoted on http://www.artchive.com/artchive/W/whistler.html).