The Blue Wave, Biarritz

Whistler was 28 years old when he painted The Blue Wave, Biarritz, considered by some to be the artist’s second major seascape (the first being The Coast of Brittany, 1861, now at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, USA). The composition of breaking waves on a rocky shore in this painting indicates the influence of Gustave Courbet; however, Whistler was beginning to create a style that was breaking away from what he decried as “that damned realism.” This emerging style, a more fluid Impressionistic approach, is evident in the rocks as flat patches of brown instead of mottled from light to dark to create three-dimensional forms and details. The way in which he used light, wispy brushstrokes to render the clouds in a blue-grey sky was a technique that would become a prominent feature in his later work.