James McNeill Whistler: Selected Works from the Hunterian Art Gallery

“One hundred years after his death, James McNeill Whistler remains a fascinating, complicated, and controversial figure.”

“’James McNeill Whistler’…presents a full picture of his creative output.”

— Peter Black, American Art Review

For the first time, selected artworks from the estate of James McNeill Whistler toured the US. The 129 works—all personal favorites of the artist and his heirs—included 12 paintings, more than 50 prints, watercolors, designs, and manuscripts, as well as personal belongings such as silverware and porcelain. Central to this collection are the remarkable etchings that may represent his most potent influences on 19th and 20th century art. By synthesizing his knowledge of Chinese and Japanese print art with his own, impressionistic aesthetic, Whistler rescued copper-plate etching from its bookish antecedents, transforming it into a fine art to be signed, framed, and hung beside his other masterpieces of oil and watercolor art. His innovations encompassed theme as well as technique: in these works and others, he often eschews the conventional “storytelling” aesthetic of 19th century pictorial art in favor of atmospheric effects and abstract impressions that have lost none of their vividness over time.

This informative, biographical exhibition spanned nearly 40 years of Whistler’s life, highlighting the locations, personalities, and aesthetic breakthroughs that both influenced his artistic vision and immortalized Whistler the man as an iconoclastic American artist.

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