JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER

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• The Embroidered Curtain, or The Lace Curtain 1889
  
  etching, printed in brown ink on laid paper; 240 x 159 mm (9 ⅜ x 6 ¼ inches)
  
  trimmed by the artist on the platemark all round; signed in pencil with the butterfly and inscribed imp on the tab
  
  Kennedy 410 first state (of seven); Glasgow 451 first state (of seven)

  WATERMARK
  Pro Patria

  PROVENANCE
  Robert Rice, his mark (not in Lugt) on verso of backing sheet
  David Tunick, Inc., New York (his code in pencil on verso of backing sheet DT …)
  Gordon Cooke Ltd., London
  private collection (acquired in 1989)

  LITERATURE
  Catalogue Number 7: Sixty-Five Prints by James McNeill Whistler, sale catalogue, David Tunick,
  Inc., New York 1975, no. 43
  Robert H. Getscher, The Stamp of Whistler, exhibition catalogue, Allen Memorial Art Museum,
  Oberlin College/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1977–78, no. 50
  Ruth E. Fine, Drawing Near: Whistler Etchings from the Zelman Collection, exhibition catalogue,
  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984–85, no. 90

  The print depicts a group of late seventeenth-century buildings at 52–54 Palmgracht in the Jordaan district of Amsterdam. The strictly frontal view and the absence of any perspective foreshortening as well as the cropping of the image together create a highly abstract effect. The overall ornamentation of the embroidered curtain in the window right off the center, to which Whistler’s title refers, can be transposed onto the composition as a whole. What we see is a carefully structured interplay of light and dark areas filled with an intricate web of lines. The squares of the window panes are the predominant geometric forms in this scheme, encased in the upright rectangles of the windows that themselves become framed by the similarly proportioned upright rectangle of the plate.

  “The Embroidered Curtain … is probably the best known of the Amsterdam etchings. Fully composed and showing no evidence of the artist’s tendency toward a vignette image, it is also the most intricately worked of the group and, it its use of surface manipulation, possibly the most fully developed of all of Whistler’s etchings.” Ruth Fine further observes that the print “is best seen in the earlier states … the later ones displaying a coarsening of line from repeated exposure to the acid” (cat. Los Angeles, p. 181).

  Our impression is, like the Nocturne: Palaces (cat. no. 66), one of the earliest pulled from the plate. The artist’s deft handling of the drypoint needle a decade earlier has now given way to a most delicate touch that can only fully be appreciated in fine impressions like this one. Since none of the Amsterdam plates were ever published, they are rare and highly sought after, with the Glasgow online catalogue listing a total of only 27 impressions.

• Nocturne: Palaces 1879–80
  
  etching and drypoint printed in dark-brown ink on off-white laid paper; 298 x 201 mm (11 ¾ x 7 ⅞ inches)
  
  trimmed by the artist just outside the platemark all round; signed in pencil with the butterfly and inscribed imp on the tab
  
  Kennedy 202 before first state (of eight); Glasgow 200 intermediary state between the first and the second (of 12)

  WATERMARK
  crowned shield with hunting horn and pendant letters WP

  PROVENANCE
  Frederick Keppel & Co., New York (their stock no. in pencil on the verso a10068)
  Mrs. John D. Rockefeller
  Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III
  Dr. and Mrs. James W. Nelson
  Linda Papaharis, New York
  private collection (acquired in 1988)

  LITERATURE
  Robert H. Getscher, The Stamp of Whistler, exhibition catalogue, Allen Memorial Art Museum,
  Oberlin College/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1977–78, nos. 56f.

  A superb impression with carefully modulated tonal wiping; in impeccable condition.

  Nocturne: Palaces, Of Us and Art: The 100 Videos Project, Episode 15 from Minneapolis Institute of Art on Vimeo.

• Nocturne 1879–80
  
  etching and drypoint, printed in dark-brown ink on laid paper; 199 x 290 mm (7 13
  16 x 11 7
  16 inches)
  
  signed with the butterfly and inscribed imp in pencil on the tab; signed again on the verso with the butterfly and inscribed selected proof and Ex –; another early pencil annotation verso: Marked by Whistler “selected proof ” and signed by him. His “Ex.” means extra fine.
  
  Kennedy 184 fifth (final) state; Glasgow 222 ninth (final) state

  PROVENANCE
  Frederick Keppel & Co., New York (his code in pencil on the verso)
  Kennedy Galleries, New York (their stock no. in pencil on the verso a44254)

  LITERATURE
  Robert H. Getscher, The Stamp of Whistler, exhibition catalogue, Allen Memorial Art Museum,
  Oberlin College/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1977–78, no. 59
  Ruth E. Fine, Drawing Near: Whistler Etchings from the Zelman Collection, exhibition catalogue,
  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1984–85, no. 59

  The plate belonged to Whistler’s “First Venice Set,” published in 1880 by the Fine Art Society under the title Etchings of Venice. Venetian night scenes like this one reflect the artist’s longstanding preoccupation with the subject; one of his earliest etchings, Street at Saverne of 1858 (Kennedy 19), is just such a scene, and he continued to develop the theme in his paintings of the 1870s as well as in an 1878 lithograph, Nocturne: The River at Battersea (Spink/Stratis/Tedeschi 8).

  Robert Getscher calls it “the most dramatic etching” in the “First Venice Set.” Due to a first-state impression at the University of Glasgow inscribed “Venice 1879” we know that the print must have been made within the first months after Whistler’s arrival in the city in September 1879 (cat. Oberlin, p. 95).

  As Ruth Fine notes, “Of all the Venice etchings, Nocturne is printed with the greatest kind of variation between impressions. Indeed, depending upon the quality of the tonal wiping, the time of day appears to range from dusk to midnight to dawn” (cat. Los Angeles, p. 133). The etching work on the plate seems to have been finished in one stage; later developments in the image were to a large extent devised solely through the use of plate-tone and drypoint. It is not surprising, therefore, that the English critics of the time were unprepared for such a radical interpretation of what a print (that was ultimately topographically conceived) could be. A review of the show at the Fine Art Society, published in The British Architect on December 10, 1880, reads: “‘Nocturne’ is different in treatment to the rest of the prints, and can hardly be called, as it stands, an etching; the bones as it were of the picture have been etched, which bones consist of some shipping and distant objects, and then over the whole plate ink has apparently been smeared. We have seen a great many representations of Venetian skies, but never saw one before consisting of brown smoke with clots of ink in diagonal lines” (quoted in cat. Oberlin, p. 97).

  The critic’s objections might easily have been directed to an impressions like the one offered here. It is an exceptionally richly inked example of the final state in which the drypoint work has lost most of its burr. The artist did not consciously remove it, however, but instead allowed it to fade away. The result is a very high level of abstraction, further enhanced in our impression by the strong plate tone. The composition as a whole does indeed—to quote from the University of Glasgow’s online catalogue—“appear to have dissolved in nocturnal mist.”

  The artistic intentionality of this effect is also made clear by Whistler’s own careful annotations, marking this impression as an outstanding example.

• Lobster Pots – Selsea Bill ca. 1880–81
  
  etching and drypoint, printed in dark-brown ink on laid paper; 120 x 203 mm (4 3/4 x 8 inches)
  
  trimmed on the platemark at top and with the platemark still just visible on the other three sides; signed in pencil with the butterfly and inscribed imp on the tab
  
  Kennedy 235 third (final) state; Glasgow 241 fourth (final) state

  WATERMARK
  partial Strasbourg lily

  PROVENANCE
  B. Bernard MacGeorge, Glasgow (Lugt 394)
  Henry Harper Benedict, New York (Lugt 1298)
  Charles C. Cunningham, Jr., New England (Lugt 4684)

  LITERATURE
  Robert H. Getscher, The Stamp of Whistler, exhibition catalogue, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1977–78, pp. 76–78, no. 46

  A very fine impression, printing with selectively wiped plate-tone that gives the foreground a slightly darker shade; in excellent condition.

  The plate was first exhibited at The Fine Art Society in London in 1883. In 1886 it was published as part of A Set of Twenty-Six Etchings, the so-called “Second Venice Set,” by Messrs. Dowdeswell and Thibaudeau.

  The etched inscription at lower right locates the scene in Selsea Bill, a small town on the south coast of England where Whistler was visiting Charles Augustus Howell. There is a wistfulness in this slight composition, suggesting that the print was made right after Whistler’s return from his first trip to Venice. However, as Robert Getscher aptly remarks, “even the Venetian subjects are never this inconsequential” (p. 76). To our modern eyes, however, this makes the print all the more intriguing. “Lobster-Pots is one of Whistler’s freest linear exercises: clusters of parallel stripes countered by aureoles of radiant hatching” (ibid., p. 78). Walter Sickert would soon afterwards move similarly close to pure abstraction in some of his beach-related etchings like Scheveningen, Bathing Machines of 1887 (Bromberg 95) and, especially, the small Scheveningen, Wind-Chairs and Shadows of the same year (Bromberg 91).