James McNeill Whistler Prints

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• The Kitchen, 1858
  
  Etching on thin, yellowish-brown chine; trimmed to the platemark an impression in the second state (of three)
  
  Signed Whistler and inscribed Imp. Delatre. Rue St. Jacques. 171. in the plate at lower right
  
  8 15/16 x 6 3/16 inches (22.7 x 15.8 cm)
  
  PROVENANCE
  Alexander John Godby, Baltimore and London (Lugt 1119b)
  Harlow, McDonald & Co., New York
  Lucien Goldschmidt, Inc., New York
  
  REFERENCE
  Kennedy 24; Glasgow 16

  Whistler made several early drawings of kitchens in addition to a preliminary pencil sketch and the watercolour of this kitchen in Lutzelbourg in Alsace-Lorraine (now in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) that was used as the basis for this etching. He transferred the image of a peasant woman gazing through a window in her modest home to the copper etching plate after his return to Paris; it was published in the French Set in this second state. As Ruth Fine notes, this print “was considered during Whistler’s lifetime one of the most beautiful of the French Set” (p.39). Indeed, it was so popular that the artist reworked the copper plate and printed a new edition of 50 impressions, published by The Fine Art Society in 1884.

  Lochnan notes the influence of the quiet domestic scenes of the French Realist painter François Bonvin on Whistler’s subject here. But like Whistler’s other etchings of women in shadowy interiors and doorways, contemplative or absorbed in their tasks, this composition also reflects the underlying geometries and the sense of stillness found in the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch master Pieter de Hooch. Here Whistler further deploys de Hooch’s method of rhythmically juxtaposing light and dark areas to draw the eye around the picture plane and into the sequence of apparently receding spaces toward the window where the woman is shown silhouetted against the light (see Lochnan, pp.41–43).

• 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.

• The Pierrot, 1889
  
  Etching and drypoint, signed with a butterfly and annotated imp.; also signed on the verso in pencil at lower right with a butterfly and annotated at lower left 1. Feb. 23 (presumably the date of printing) and For Wünderlich (H. Wünderlich & Co. exhibited this print and others from the Amsterdam Set in New York in 1898), printed in brown ink on laid paper, watermark Pro Patria; there was no published edition
  
  9 1/16 x 6 3/8 inches (23.1 x 16.2 cm)
  
  PROVENANCE
  J. Caldwell; Arthur H. Harlow and Co., New York
  Lucien Goldschmidt, New York
  R. Garton and Co., London, February 15, 1990
  
  REFERENCE
  Kennedy 407; Glasgow 450

  This extraordinary image, its various details and textures vividly represented by the artist in etching and drypoint, shows a young man standing in the doorway of a crumbling building and a woman rinsing a cloth in the water of the canal to his right. They are probably dyers at work. As in La Vieille aux locques [cat.7] and La Marchande de Moutarde [cat.5], among many subsequent examples (not least in the Venice sets), here the artist depicts a working figure in a doorway set against a dark interior. The sophisticated chiaroscuro effects are, characteristically, extended to his nuanced description of the watery reflections below.

  The tragi-comic Pierrot pining for his lost love, a stock figure of the Italian commedia dell’ arte, was the subject of renewed interest in nineteenth-century theater and cabaret as well as among artists and poets. Whistler himself had made a caricature showing the celebrated Bohemian-French mime, Jean-Gaspard Dubureau (1796–1846), as Pierrot in a lithograph titled Dubureau entraînant Mme Ristori à son théâtre des Bouffes published in 1857 in Les Gallois; he had also made sketches of clowns during his student days in Paris (see Glasgow catalogue).

  This one must be added to the 33 impressions of this print in all states recorded by the Glasgow catalogue.

• 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.

• Zaandam, 1889
  
  Etching, signed with a butterfly and annotated imp., also signed in pencil on the verso with a butterfly and inscribed 3rd proof printed, printed in warm black ink on laid paper, trimmed at the platemark leaving a signature tab; there was no published edition
  
  5 1/4 x 8 11/16 (13.1 x 22.1 cm)
  
  REFERENCE
  Kennedy 416; Glasgow 458

  This rare first-state impression of the etching “can be considered a tribute to The View of Amsterdam from the Northwest (1640; B.110) by Rembrandt” (Glasgow catalogue). Whistler’s etching shows a canal in the foreground with a wide stretch of meadow beyond. A long line of windmills and the church tower and buildings of the small town of Zaandam punctuate the horizon.

  The print, like the Amsterdam Set, was never published. When Joseph Pennell, the printmaker and later Whistler’s biographer, saw this print on view in 1890 at Robert Dunthorne’s gallery in London he was moved to observe that “no one since Rembrandt could have done it, and in his plate the greatest of modern etchers has pitted himself against the greatest of the ancients and has come through only too successfully for Rembrandt” (quoted in Glasgow catalogue).

  This one must be added to the sixteen impressions in all states recorded in the Glasgow catalogue.