Artwork story
About Nocturne
The artist and artwork
John La Farge made Nocturne around 1885 with watercolor, opaque gouache, and charcoal on a small sheet of paper. By the late 1870s he had become a founder and leader of the American watercolor movement. Here one blue-violet flower and curling green leaves rise from a field of layered blues. Transparent washes, denser body color, and charcoal contours let the image shift between an observed plant, a study of color, and an almost abstract arrangement.
The world around it
Nocturne belongs to the increasingly ambitious New York art world of the 1870s and 1880s. Specialized clubs and exhibitions argued that watercolor and other so-called minor media possessed expressive power equal to oil painting, while Aestheticism opened markets for intimate works, interior decoration, and design. La Farge was among the American artists most alert to Japanese design. The Met identifies Japanese asymmetry and broad tonal planes in this sheet, evidence of an international visual exchange that reshaped American composition without requiring a literal Japanese subject.
A detail to notice
The title Nocturne gives a flower the atmosphere of a piece of night music. La Farge does not isolate it against blank paper for botanical identification. Instead, the bloom opens low in a deep blue field, its pale throat crossed by two sharp white arcs while leaves and stems drift diagonally below. The surrounding color is visibly worked: blue, violet, turquoise, gray, and touches of pink overlap without becoming a conventional room or garden. Feathered paint edges stop before the paper's border, so the off-white surround remains part of the object rather than disappearing behind an imagined frame. The quiet depends on imbalance, large empty tonal space above, concentrated plant forms below, and on close color differences that only gradually reveal the charcoal marks, La Farge's signature, and the boundary between flower and atmosphere.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is watercolor made in Watercolor, gouache, and charcoal on off-white wove paper adhered to wove paper and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 8 1/4 x 7 in. (21 x 17.8 cm).
Subject terms include Flowers and Still Life. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Bequest of Miss Louise Veltin, 1937.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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