In the early 1870s,  the American Artist James McNeill Whistler began a series of works called Nocturnes. The paintings are moody, dramatic, often sombre in tone and sometimes quite daring in their execution. So much so, that the critic John Ruskin, on seeing one of Whistler’s Nocturnes at a showing in London and sensing their abstract modernity wrote of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.’ During the infamous libel trial which followed, Whistler, when questioned, described his paintings as simply ‘an arrangement of light, form and colour’. Perhaps for these reasons, Whistler’s use of musical terms reflected his own growing attraction to abstract form.