ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the James McNeill Whistler's working practice and situate these works within a set of discourses generated by the process of moving around and viewing the city, a process which created the city not only as a physical environment but also as a 'category of thought and experience'. Narratives of the exploration of the urban environment and its social boundaries and contested spaces are interwoven with compositional strategies and aesthetic categories which dramatize Whistler's encounter with the city and synthesize it into art. The aesthetic effects of Whistler's innovative construction of the picture plane in the 1859 Thames etchings and the influence of optical theory on the artist have been analysed by Katharine Lochnan. Whistler's compositional strategies and use of etched lines as both representation and patterning simultaneously disrupted visual expectations and created a form of picturesque urban grotesque.
