PRINTS
Whistler, James McNeill
U.S. (1834 - 1903)
Long Venice
1879 - 1880
Etching on laid paper
4 7/8 x 12 1/8 in. (12.5 x 30.8 cm) sheet size, trimmed to plate mark size
Stimson Collection, gift of Dorothy Stimson Bullitt
FA 77.170

After Whistler's bankruptcy, he was happy to accept a commission by the Fine Arts Society of London to etch twelve scenes of Venice for them to publish. Inspired by Ruskin's Stones of Venice and Turner's paintings, Whistler had long planned to go to Italy. He arrived on September 16, but his agreed upon stay of one month quickly stretched to three. This series called The First Venice Set shows another progression in his artistic development. The famous monuments rarely appear in Whistler's Venice. He shows the city in close anonymous doorways, black canals, or from a distance, a thin silhouette on the horizon. In Venice, Whistler used larger plates than he normally did. The largest was 9 7/8 x 14 1/8 inches, but these did not begin to compare to the overblown productions which were commonplace in England and France at the time. He printed this set himself using a small press belonging to a young American art student, Otto Bacher, who was only too glad to lend 'the master' his press. Whistler also used a larger press in a local Italian print shop. The artist was notoriously particular about the paper he used. Most of the Venice etchings were printed on 18th-century Dutch laid paper. He scoured secondhand bookshops and paper dealers, looking for the adequate materials. The proof paper had to be old, recognizable by its 'beautiful tint of gold' and have a certain odor because of the decay of the size in the paper. -- Label copy for James McNeill Whistler: A Dreamer Apart, Reed Gallery, March 27 - June 15, 1990.