Wapping

Named for the working riverside district where it was painted, Wapping stands among the most ambitious of the realist views James McNeill Whistler made of the Thames in the early 1860s. It is set at the Angel Inn, a waterside tavern, and Whistler reworked the canvas for years — begun about 1860 and continued into 1865 — while Joanna Hiffernan, the companion who dominated his early art, appears among the figures on the balcony. The plain daylight, the frank record of the industrial waterfront, and the realism Whistler had absorbed from Courbet mark the picture as a pivotal experiment on the road to his later, purely tonal art.