Dundee Art Galleries & Museum: 272-1987-316
Artist: Whistler, James Abbott McNeill
Date: 1860
State: 6/6
Size: 27.3 x 20 cm
Medium: Etching
Details | Etching. Black ink on ivory coloured wove paper. ‘Whistler 1860’ inscribed on banister bottom left. |
Description | Detailed information concerning the Whistler prints held in The Orchar Collection comes from the University of Glasgow’s excellent Whistler Etchings Project. (Margaret F. MacDonald, Grischka Petri, Meg Hausberg, and Joanna Meacock, James McNeill Whistler: The Etchings, a catalogue raisonné, University of Glasgow, 2012, on-line website at http://etchings.arts.gla.ac.uk). Considerable thanks are due to Professor MacDonald for allowing us to use their research in these entries.
Early impressions were published in A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames (‘The Thames Set’) by Ellis & Green in 1871. The view is in reverse and has resulted in the location confusingly being identified as Wapping. The image was sketched in Rotherhithe on the south side of the Thames looking across the river to Wapping. The inn where the image was sketched still exists. It is ‘The Angel’ in Bermondsey Wall East, Rotherhithe. The long scratch that tears across the plate from top to bottom was apparently caused by the artist having been startled by a brick falling close to him as he worked. The etching bears a relationship to Whistler’s painting Wapping, 1860-4 (National Gallery of Art, Washington). In the painting the figures include Whistler’s regular model Joanna Hiffernan, the painter Matthew White Ridley and an unidentified sailor. The scene showing a working area of the Thames is of a type that was popular in the ‘Realist’ narratives of the mid-19th century. |
Catalogue Entry |
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Other Collections (UK) |
See the Whistler Etchings Project for a list of impressions. |
References |
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