In this ethereal nocturne, Diana Neale achieves a remarkable synthesis of East and West that would have delighted James McNeill Whistler himself. The high horizon line flattened spatial planes, and delicate gradations of blue-green recall the revolutionary compositional strategies that Whistler absorbed from Hiroshige's One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, particularly those moonlit river scenes where reality dissolves into pure atmospheric poetry. Like Whistler's Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge, this intimate work employs what Whistler called "the Japanese theory of drawing", the art of supreme selection that reduces landscape to its essential harmonies. The pale moon, partially glimpsed like a fragment of ancient porcelain, evokes the bokashi gradations of ukiyo-e printing.

At the same time, the horizontal bands of terrain echo the simplified forms of sumi-e ink painting. Here is Neale's homage to the Japonisme that transformed Western art: the same spirit that inspired Van Gogh's collection of four hundred Japanese prints and guided Whistler's butterfly signature now breathes through her contemporary vision. As Lafcadio Hearn wrote of Japan's "world of ghosts made beautiful," Neale captures that liminal realm where moonlight, with its transformative power, turns the familiar Wessex landscape into something altogether more mysterious. In this place, Whistler's Thames might flow into Hiroshige's Sumida River, and for one silvered moment, the floating world of dreams made manifest in paint.