I’ll admit, dear reader, that this isn’t actually a New Year’s painting. It’s surprisingly hard to find one (in the Western tradition, pre-1900 or so, anyway). Childe Hassam has a lovely one, but it’s not that obviously festive.
So instead I went with James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s circa 1875 Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, which at least has the advantage of looking wonderfully celebratory.
Indeed it is, to quote Jonathan Jones’ effusive description in the Guardian, a “luscious, diaphanous, sexy image of sparks cascading through the night air over the Thames during a firework display.”
It is also the piece that sparked a libel trial when critic John Ruskin complained that Whistler would “ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” (As the Tate quotes him as saying.)
A trial that included—according to the Detroit Institute of Arts—the following delightful exchange:
“Attorney General: Did it take you much time to paint the Nocturne in Black and Gold? How soon did you knock it off?
Whistler: Oh, I ‘knock one off’ possibly in a couple of days—(laughter)—one day to do the work and another to finish it…
Attorney General: The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?
Whistler: No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.
(Applause)”
