Le Rhin

Whistler's descriptive powers are exhibited in this drawing of passengers on Rhine steamer. The wealth of detail seems to prefigure another passage from Flaubert's novel, The Sentimental Education.

Apart from a few bourgeois traveling first class,
the passengers were laborers, or shopkeepers...In
those days it was the custom to dress shabbily for a
journey, so nearly all of them wore old skullcaps or
faded hats, cheap black suits rubbed threadbare against
desks, or frock-coats with their buttons splitting
open from heavy use at the store...Some chatted
together, standing or squatting on their luggage,
others slept in corners.
Whistler's precise notations extend to the relaxed pair of feet portruding into the picture space at the bottom right, and a tantalizing book strapped to a knapsack: La Poire aux Vanitee, perhaps a sardonic reference to the recently deposed Louis-Philippe. However, by about the time Flaubert's novel was published in 1869, Whistler was already moving beyond descriptive literalism in his painting and reaching toward abstraction that he believed was the territory of the painter and the musician, if not the writer.