Whistler

Whistler was the 19th-century painter who insisted on signing his paintings with a butterfly, as if art were a kind of delicate winged joke. He liked to sneak into the Thames at dawn just to watch the light hit the water before anyone else was up. His little watercolors of bridges and boats are so quiet you almost miss the way he turns a smudge of blue into the whole river. Slide into Whistler’s world via *Westgate*—a single sheet of paper that somehow holds the whole of a Victorian seaside town without breaking a sweat.