1. Glazer, Jacobson, McCarthy, Roeder, wall label, 2019:
During a trip to Brittany in northern France in the 1890s, Whistler painted the nearly abstract Choppy Channel from a boat. The broken brushwork, with the paper support showing through patches of blue and green, conveys what he saw and suggests his working conditions on the rough water. Whistler's familiar signature of a butterfly–a green one is caught in a wave at the lower left–announces the artist's presence in the scene.
2. Lee Glazer, 2018:
Title change: On the verso in Whistler's hand is the title "Blue & Silver" The Chopping Channel with his butterfly signature. In the original receipt from Goupil Gallery to Freer dated August 1, 1899, the piece was titled Blue and Silver–Choppy Channel. That was also its title in its first exhibition with Goupil in Sheffield, 1898, and it is the title used by MacDonald in the catalogue raisonné. It was first exhibited as Blue and Silver: Chopping Channel in Boston at the Copley Society in 1904 (99), and this altered title was used in subsequent exhibitions and publications.
1. Curry: James McNeill Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art, Pg. 204
Abstract and free, Whistler's Chopping Channel must have been painted from a boat out on the water. His rough brushwork serves as a visual metaphor for the channel itself, which was noted for stormy weather. While the piece may seem "modern" in its abstraction, it can be related to plein-air sketches made by French Academicians like Valenciennes in the late eighteenth century. Such sketches were remarkably abstract and were the first steps toward the so-called "subjectless" landscape.
2. Christopher Finch: Twentieth-Century Watercolors. Cross River Press, 1988.
"...successful in reconciling Gallic innovations with Anglo-Saxton traditions, was the London-based American James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whose influence was deeply felt in some quarters at the turn of the century. Whistler's ability to absorb the lessons of Manet and Edgar Degas without submerging his own personality has been much remarked, as has his fruitful involvement with Oriental art, and both these influences are apparent in watercolors such as Blue and Silver–Chopping Channel. At the same time, this tiny masterpiece, with its swift calligraphy and its utter simplicity of concept, can be seen as a logical extension of the values of the British watercolor school.
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