JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER PRINTS

[20] Longshore Men, 1859
Etching and drypoint, printed in black ink on thin laid paper,
in the fourth (final) state; there was no published edition
6 x 8 3/4 inches (15.1 x 22.2 cm)
sheet 8 x 11 1/4 inches (20.7 x 28.5 cm)
Reference: Kennedy 45; Glasgow 52
This interior probably depicts an inn or pub in Wapping or
Rotherhithe and belongs to the period when Whistler had
lodgings there. Longshore men were in the news at the
time of the election of the new Lord Mayor of London in
the autumn of 1859 because they expected to be rewarded
for supporting the favoured candidate at the Guildhall. In
September 1859 The Times wrote that ‘Long-shore men’ were
considered or considered themselves to some extent ‘above
the law’, and defined them as ‘a number of very dilapidated
citizens who may be seen wandering along the banks of the
river at low water, and pursuing their researches among the
debris of dead dogs, bottles, bones, oystershells, and bits of
coal which form the margin of our Father Thames’ (quoted in
Glasgow catalogue).
The print was never published, but it is not uncommon.
Some impressions were printed in the 1890s or after the artist’s
death, possibly for the New York print dealer Frederick
Keppel. It was first shown in Whistler’s own one-man exhibition
in 1874 at the Flemish Gallery on Pall Mall in London.
The plate is now in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
[21] Black Lion Wharf, 1859
Etching and drypoint, printed in black ink on laid paper, an
impression in the fourth (final) state, aside from the edition
published in A Series of Sixteen Etchings of Scenes on the Thames and
Other Subjects (the Thames Set)
6 x 8 7/8 inches (15 x 22.5 cm) sheet 8 x 13 inches (20.3 x 33 cm)
Provenance: Henri Beraldi
Literature: Kennedy 42; Glasgow 54
An impression of Black Lion Wharf was exhibited at the
Royal Academy of Arts in 1860 (902) and it is thus one of
the first of the Thames etchings to be shown in public.
Its importance to the artist may be suggested by its
inclusion, framed on the wall, in his painting Arrangement
in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871;
Musée d’Orsay, Paris), perhaps Whistler’s best-known
work.
Black Lion Wharf was on the north bank of the
Thames near St Katharine’s Dock, just below the Tower
of London. Katharine Lochnan has suggested that it was
drawn from the Horsleydown New Stairs on the South
Bank, and that, uniquely among the Thames subjects,
it was drawn in reverse so that the view appears the right
way round in the etching.
The print was exhibited in The Works of James Whistler
– Etchings and Dry Points at E. Thomas’s print shop at
39 Old Bond Street in 1861, and then at the Société
Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1862. The subject
was published in the Thames Set; no.1. The plate was
sold by F. Keppel & Co. to Charles Lang Freer in 1896
and is now in the Freer Gallery of Art.
34 london and the thames james mcneill whistler: prints 35