Exhibition of the week Whistler & Nature

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (01223-332900, fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk). Until 17 March

James Mcneill Whistler (1834-1903) is best remembered as a “society” artist, said Claudia Pritchard in the I newspaper. Born to a family of soldiers and engineers in the industrial town of Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler originally trained as a mapmaker before he moved, in 1855, to Europe, where he plied a “commercially necessary” trade painting “glamorous” likenesses of Victorian London’s most eminent figures. In truth, though, Whistler’s greatest works depicted not the grandees of the time, but the swiftly modernising urban environment he inhabited. A new travelling show – currently on display at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum – foregrounds this “very different” side of his work, bringing together etchings, drawings and paintings that place Whistler far from the “drawing rooms of Chelsea”, and instead highlight his fascination with “industry, trade and fog”.

That’s all very well, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, but why is the exhibition called Whistler & Nature? It’s as “perverse” as can be. Whistler had no love of nature: a perfectionist and a dandy, he hated the way it “kept cropping up all over the place without any thought of harmony, structure or aesthetic restraint”. Yes, there are many brilliant pictures here: witness the “outlandish” etchings he made in Venice – where he went after losing all his money during his famous libel suit against John Ruskin – or indeed the “gloaming and smoke” of his 1890s sketches of Waterloo Bridge. But the work on display mostly falls “so far from the theme of nature, on the whole, as to make a mockery of the show’s title”. Worse, there are many key pieces missing: only one of Whistler’s celebrated Nocturnes – a gorgeous series of paintings of the Thames at night – is included. There are 90 works in this show, but it amounts to a disappointingly “puny” selection.

True, the focus on nature is “misleading”, said Rachel CampbellJohnston in The Times. Yet Whistler’s genius shines through regardless. Among the “highlights” are “subtly beautiful watercolours” painted on trips to the coast, etchings that nod to Rembrandt’s “dramatic light effects” and compositions influenced by Japanese woodcuts. Also impressive is his “tiny, monochromatic” etching depicting the “smoke and soot” of the docks at Black Lion Wharf, and his “hazily evocative” Battersea Reach from Lindsey Houses (1864-71), one of a disappointingly small number of oil paintings on display. While it may not deliver what it advertises, this is a “quietly lovely show”.