Dundee Art Galleries & Museum: 272-1987-319
Artist: Whistler, James Abbott McNeill
Date: 1859
State: 2/2
Size: 25.4 x 17.8 cm
Medium: Etching
Alternative Title(s) | W. Jones, Lime-Burner, Thames Street |
Details | Etching. Black ink on ivory coloured wove paper. ‘Whistler 1859’ bottom right in print. Over 100 impressions are known. |
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.
This etching was published in A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames (‘The Thames Set’) by Ellis & Green in 1871. An impression was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1860 and included the name and address of the male figure; ‘W. Jones, Lime-burner, Thames Street.’ The business has been identified as William Jones & Co. 241 and 242 Wapping High Street, which backed onto East London Lime Wharf. The subject is a typical ‘modern life’ scene as proposed by the influential French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire who Whistler met in the 1850s. Since the 1840s Baudelaire had urged artists to focus on realist, typically urban, subject matter and the ‘Thames Set’ is a good example of his influence. The use of a frame within a frame – to suggest depth and recession – was a common compositional device used by Whistler in his etchings. Here Whistler also contrasts strong areas of light and dark for atmospheric effect. |
Catalogue Entry |
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Other Collections (UK) |
See the Whistler Etchings Project for a list of impressions. |
References |
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