Falling Rocket: James Whistler, John Ruskin and the Battle for Modern Art by historian Paul Thomas Murphy narrates the never-fully-told story of the artistic battle between James Abbot MacNeill Whistler and John Ruskin over Whistler’s controversial painting, ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket’.
In November 1878, America’s greatest painter sued England’s greatest critic for a bad review. The painter won—but ruined himself in the process. The painter: James McNeill Whistler, whose combination of incredible talent, unflagging energy, and relentless self-promotion had by that time brought him to the very edge of artistic pre-eminence. The critic: John Ruskin, Slade Professor of Art at Oxford University, whose four-decades’ worth of prolific and highly respected literary output on aesthetics had made him England’s unchallenged and seemingly unchallengeable arbiter of art. Though Whistler and Ruskin both lived in London and moved in the same artistic world, they had, until June 1877 managed to completely avoid one another.
But that month, Ruskin walked into the Grosvenor Gallery’s new exhibition of art and gazed with horror upon Whistler’s ‘Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket’. The painting was Whistler’s interpretation of a fireworks display at Chelsea’s Cremorne Gardens, but to Ruskin it was nothing more than a chaotic, incomprehensible mess of bright spots upon dark masses, an assault upon everything he had ever written or taught on the subject. In a review he vilified Whistler for seeking ‘two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’.
The internationally reported, widely discussed and hugely entertaining trial that followed was a titanic battle between the opposing ideas and ideals of two larger-than-life personalities. For these two protagonists, Whistler v Ruskin was a battle of their two lifetimes, one with a profound impact upon their personal lives—and upon the course of modern art.
About the Author:
Paul Thomas Murphy is the author of Shooting Victoria, a New York Times Notable Book, and Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane, a finalist for the Edgar Award for Fact Crime. He holds advanced degrees in Victorian Studies from Oxford and McGill Universities and the University of Colorado, where he taught both English and writing on interdisciplinary topics.
‘Falling Rocket’ will be UK published by Pegasus Books – 30th January 2025 www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Falling-Rocket/Paul-Thomas-Murphy