On a damp London evening in the summer of 1875, James McNeill Whistler took a small wooden panel out into a riverside pleasure garden in Chelsea and watched a firework burst over the trees. He carried the panel home, set it on his easel, and painted what he had seen as a smear of gold sparks falling through a dark blue mist — the rocket itself reduced to a flicker, the audience below to two indistinct figures, the night to a wash of weather and smoke. He titled the work Noctu