James McNeil Whistler (1834 - 1903)
Title: Billingsgate
Medium: Etching and drypoint, printed in black ink on cream colored medium weight laid paper
Dimensions: Plate = 6 X 8 7/8 in. (15.2 X 22.5 cm) Sheet = 7 1/2 X 10 1/2 inches
Condition: Overall good with tape on outer top edges with mild foxing
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James McNeill Whistler 'James Abbott McNeill Whistler': Whistler is one of the truly great painters of the nineteenth century. Yet it is in his oeuvre of original etchings and lithographs that his true genius becomes most apparent and his influence upon the development of twentieth century art is at its most far reaching. James McNeill Whistler turned first to etching and his initial great works in this medium date from the mid 1850's when he lived in Paris and met such artists as Degas, Legros and Courbet. The finest of these early etchings, now known as The French Set, show the work of an artist as worthy in his architectural views as Meryon and as perceptive in his figure studies and portraits as Rembrandt. His greatest work, however, still lay ahead.
James A. McNeill Whistler made London his permanent home in 1858. It was here -- despite the personal battles he fought, such as his lengthy feud with his artist brother-in-law, Seymour Haden, and his notorious legal war with John Ruskin -- that his truly revolutionary art emerges. This begins in 1859 with James McNeill Whistler's etchings of London and its dockyards (later called The Thames Set) where a much more free and sympathetic line is developed.
In August of 1859 James McNeill Whistler lived in both Wapping and Rotherhithe, close to the London Docks and that busy area of the Thames called 'The Pool'. During the following two months he created eight etchings (including Billingsgate) upon this subject. Each of these path-finding etchings explore then uncharted waters. The docks, barges, ships, workers and adjacent buildings were brilliantly analyzed by Whistler in patterns of both horizontal and vertical lines and spaces. In Billingsgate, for example, the vertical presence of the foreground barge and the standing figures directs our eyes to the tall buildings and masted ships in the background. These very vertical elements are countered by the bridge in the background.
When P. G. Hamerton printed this impression of Billingsgate in 1880 he wasn't quite sure of certain aspects of the composition. Echoing the sentiments of many at this time he wrote,"The peculiar state in which the artist has chosen to leave the larger foreground figures in this etching has in some instances led to indignant protests... I do not like either the ghostly larger figures or the foreground barge, but the etching contains many excellent passages. The buildings and the quay to the left, with the small figures, are full of curious work, both very observant and very original. There is a harmony in the thin lines of the masts and in the festoons of the converging cables which approaches poetical synthesis." *
Many critics thus missed the truly revolutionary aspects of Whistler's art. Beginning with etchings such as Billingsgate, James Abbott McNeill Whistler was the first artist to recognize that the eye and brain cannot focus upon near and distant objects at the same time. In his etched art, this realization led to a complete re-examination between line and form and light and shade. The path that began with these 1859 Thames etchings culminated in Whistler's Venice etchings of the early 1880's, etchings which many scholars now term of the first works of truly modern art.
For each of his 'Thames' etchings James McNeill Whistler pulled only proofs with the assistance of the printer Auguste Delatre in 1859-1860. The plates were steel-faced in 1871 and published in an edition of one hundred under the title of A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and Other Subjects. Known almost immediately as The Thames Set, further editions were printed in 1879 and 1890. All plates from The Thames Set (including Billingsgate) were canceled in 1897. Billingsgate was also published by Macmillan and Co., London for P. G. Hamerton's Etching and Etchers in 1880.